


Walkers of the Winding Path

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Enemies to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Monster Hunters, More Like Rivals to Lovers Though, Murderflirting, Road Trips, Romance, The Witcher AU, Too Many Dick Jokes, Very Prickly Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2020-08-12 02:29:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20128327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: A witcher's job is simple: take contracts, slay monsters, profit. Alec is a wandering young witcher, nearing his wits' end, when he happens on a contract almost too good to be true. The catch is that the job comes with a partner: the beautiful, troublesome Magnus, who seems too wise to Alec's secrets, but keeps many of his own.Together they hunt monsters—and fall in love.(A Shadowhunters/The Witcher fusion. No knowledge of either canon necessary.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's summer, and in summer we write fantasy. This is a weird side project I started to amuse myself, so let's see what happens. So: a while ago, I finished playing _The Witcher III: Wild Hunt_ and, like any rational person, immediately cooked up a _Shadowhunters_ AU.
> 
> You don't have to know anything about _The Witcher_ to enjoy this. The one-sentence primer is: Magnus and Alec are professional monster hunters in a war-torn, Slavic-influenced medieval fantasy world. There's more, like _all_ the angst inherent in becoming a witcher, but the fic will give you the rest. It plays a bit fast and loose with the game lore, so please don't expect total fidelity.
> 
> You don't really need to know _Shadowhunters_ to enjoy this, either, but it might be slightly more relevant, as the characters are from there.
> 
> **Warnings**: This story contains references to war violence, cultural (medieval-flavour) homophobia and xenophobia. Both Alec and Magnus have some not nice stuff in their past. It's discussed but nothing graphic happens in the fic itself. _This fic is rated E for porn but definitely M for mature themes_.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec meets a beautiful stranger with a proposal that certainly has no strings attached.

The first frost of autumn surprises Alec on the road. The forest pond near which he camped is covered in glittering rime so fine that it melts at a brush of his fingers. Horse stamps and snorts on her tether, her breath forming clouds in the dagger-sharp dawn air.

"Sorry, girl," he mutters to her. "I'll try to find us a roof for tonight."

She chews on his sleeve until he finds a half-dry hunk of bean bread to appease her. His own breakfast isn't much better: porridge from the last of his oats, and tea from mixed leaves gone bitter.

_ Life is hard as the Path is long_, the greybeards at Kaer Seren used to tell his group of initiates as they grappled with their lessons, memorising illuminated bestiaries and multiplication tables with the same squinting piety. Alec did, at least. His life before Kaer Seren is a few dreamlike flashes. He found his purpose at the fortress haven of the School of the Griffin. The witchers took him in, taught him his letters and figures and the mysteries of the world, made him the man he is.

There was a family, before. A sister, keen and dark of hair. A brother, fair and noisy and as beloved. Sometimes he dreams about his mother's voice. She tries to warn him about something, fear folded into her strict tone.

It doesn't matter. He's on the Path now, selling his skills as a witcher in his own right. Four of his group of seven youth died in the Trial of the Grasses. A lucky bunch, Master Hodge called them. He expected only one or two to survive the initiation.

Alec doesn't know if he's lucky. He's spent eight summers wandering, taking contracts, hunting all manner of beasts, honing his craft. This year brought him farther west than he's ever been.

The area is called Velen. It's a mixture of hilly old-growth forest, sinking bogs rife with drowners—he killed six the other day, seeking his latest ill-fated target—and stubborn farming villages struggling to live in the crush of two rival realms that vie for control of the region.

In theory, the work is good. War breeds opportunity in his profession, too. When the guards of local nobility are kept close to their granges and estates, and the hunters pressed into army ranks, monsters creep closer to fields and huts.

In practice, Alec just waded through a bog for two days to find the nightwraith he'd agreed to slay. He barely managed to cut a trophy from the creature as proof of the kill before it dissolved into ash and essence. Now, the bony hand with its tattered lace cuff in his saddlebag is useless to him.

He returned to the village whose ealdorman contracted him to find only smoking ruins. One of the roving armies had come through and had its sport. The survivors were long since gone.

His provisions are as thin as a later-winter hare, there's no payment in sight, and summer's warm days are running out on him. He can live off the land a while longer. He can buy oats for Horse, but a farrier needs to take a look at her shoes. His quiver rattles too empty, and his swords are half blunt, the coating on the silver one scratched on one edge.

He pulls out the notice he took from a post at the last hamlet he passed. _ WITCER WANTED_, it begins. The hand looks like the scribe was deep into their cups already at the first stroke of the quill.

The inn where he can ask for the client is along the road. If it still stands, this can't be worse than his last job.

He makes a warding gesture to keep the thought from coming true, then saddles Horse. She lifts her head, glad to be moving in the morning chill. He pats her smooth chestnut neck and wheels her back towards the muddy track of the road.

*

The Hart's Head Inn sags subtly groundward at one end. The eaves are shored up with timbers. The walls themselves are worn grey, but the sod roof looks relatively fresh, and the bustle in the yard doesn't even hitch as a patrol of one royal army trundles past. Their scarlet banners billow against the clouds that whisper rain across the fields.

Alec ducks around the soldiers, the drizzle an excuse to draw his hood up. He'd rather not give them the chance to see his eyes, altered by the Trial, or linger on the swords strapped to his saddle. His medallion, cast in the shape of a griffin's head, is tucked deep under his shirt.

These days, witchers are a dying breed. Only a few of the old schools survive, and they've resorted to secrecy and isolation to guard their knowledge. Once the witchers were scholar-warriors that stood against the dark things of the world. Now they're more often lumped in with the monsters they fight—or, at best, treated as a necessary evil to keep back a greater one.

Even so, somebody put out a call for a witcher. Somebody here understands what a contract with one means: payment for services rendered. Neither party will ask impertinent questions.

When the patrol is gone, Alec leaves Horse with a stable-hand and enters the common room.

The smoke-stained room is glutted with patrons: ragged, broody mercenaries bent possessively over their cheap ale, farmhands wetting their throats after a day in the fields, a troupe of mummers holding court at a table next to the low-burning hearth. Whispers shiver across the crowd as Alec steps in.

He's taller than most men he's ever met, and even wrapped in his cloak, his two swords give him away. They're custom-forged for him, forty-one inches of rippled crucible steel and silver with a core of meteorite iron, respectively. Steel for men, silver for monsters. They mark a witcher to anybody with a mote of wits between their ears. Nor can Alec shake the telling sureness of his steps or the strength of his frame, honed by merciless practice.

Hunching his shoulders, he asks for the merchant that posted the notice. The serving girl points him upstairs, and he's glad to escape the sidelong glances.

The merchant looks too well fed to have spent long in Velen, and his accent points south of the Pontar River—Vizima, if Alec had to guess. His woe is both singular and endlessly repeated: a flying beast razed his camp in the night, stole a horse and injured two others so they had to be put down. His wares are spoiling as he waits for new animals. The war is a wretched, cursed thing, a plight upon an honest trader. When he's gone on at some length, comes the punchline: "It so happens I already hired a man. If you can make me a competing offer, I may tell the fellow—"

"Uh, no." Alec swallows his dismay. "Witcher's Code. If you've made a contract, I can't take another hunter's job unless he fails."

He's met those on the Path who'd have no scruples undermining a peer. He'd rather preserve his scruples, even with disappointment dulling his spirits. Kaer Seren taught him better than to stoop to deceit.

Without the money he could've made here, it's going to be a lean, hard road back to the fortress for the winter.

The merchant shrugs, and with that, Alec is dismissed. He counts his coin and pays for a meal and a stall for Horse for the night. He'll sleep in the hay next to her, or in the stable loft, if the hands don't mind.

He wanted to avoid Novigrad. The Free City lies to the west beyond Oxenfurt, by the sea. Alec's heard enough stories to know there would be opportunity for him in Novigrad—even a posting to see him through the snows. He's also heard more troubling rumours.

The Church of the Eternal Fire has grown in power in Novigrad. Never a lenient faith, it has now set its witch hunters after anybody and everybody it can brand a deviant. Elves, dwarves, mages, pellars, soothsayers are all under threat. Alec lives or dies by his blade and bow, but even a lone witcher caught in the wrong place might not be safe from the pyres.

The crowd thins as he eats his stew. Rain hammers on the shutters in earnest, and the serving girl lights a few fluttering lamps to counter the dimming natural light. A minstrel among the mummers strikes up a song, though few patrons even turn in their seats. Alec tries to keep his eyes to himself. Attention, in whatever form, is more trouble than it's worth.

Somebody sidles onto the bench next to him and, bold as you please, picks up his unstrung bow in its waxed leather bag.

Mother's mercy, he hates drunkards.

"Put it down," he says, with enough weight that he could impress each word into the oaken tabletop. He has a knife in his sleeve. He doesn't want to pull it on some idiot too full of harvest ale.

"You know how to handle this, stranger?" The interloper shucks the bag with no more care than if he were shelling peas. "Oh, this is a beauty."

Alec's face goes to stone with sudden anger. The man isn't drunk; he's just a prick with delusions of grandeur. "Put the bow down before I break your face on the table."

"You don't think an invigorating little romp would put a spark in the sullen mood here? We'd be as good as doing them a favour."

Alec doesn't like using his stature or his profession to cow people, but he levers himself to stand, looming over the intruder. "Do as I _ tell you_, or—"

The man looks back at him with a merry glint in his eyes. His slit pupils are wide in the dim light, the iris encircling them a dark shade of amber. The sides of his head are shaved close to the scalp, and the hair on top curls down to the nape of his neck in an ink-black, oiled braid. The undone laces of his bleached linen shirt show light brown skin webbed by twisted scar tissue. Just below his collarbones rests a cat's head medallion on a sturdy silver chain.

Alec's bow—maple and sinew and leshen horn, commissioned for him by Master Hodge when he first set out on the Path—rests on the strange witcher's lap. His fine-boned hands toy with the string nock. Rings of silver and brass decorate his fingers.

"Very imposing." The witcher laughs, a dark, honeyed sound, and holds out the bow. Alec barely stops himself from snatching it back with too much force. Instead, he covers the bow again, tugging the bag cord tight.

This must be his competitor. Though the man looks more like a high-class actor gone to seed, the eyes don't lie. The Trial of the Grasses changes a youth's eyes to see in the dark and whets their senses to trap the faintest noise.

Alec feels the attention creeping up on them like a bitterness in the back of his throat. The man's made a show of him in the middle of the common room.

"What do you want?" He lowers his voice, but it still hisses with annoyance.

"A word, if you care to lend your haughty Griffin ear to a proposition from a Cat lowlife. Isn't that the prevailing image of us in the north?" The man leans back. The open shirt slides off one well-muscled shoulder, and Alec hates his own eyes intensely for the second they trace over the man's skin. The display is on purpose. And Alec just wanted a hot meal and somewhere dry to sleep.

"If you wanted to make a good first impression, your first mistake was touching my weapons."

"Ah. You're a tender sort." The man grins. Alec adds his ridiculous goatee and the slant of his mouth on the list of things he loathes at present. "You'd prefer some music and moonlight, before being bent over—or bending your ear?"

Alec's throat burns. His muscles pull taut as wires, the tension choking his voice. Before he knows it, he's grabbed his gear and stormed to the door, to startled laughter from across the room.

He muddies his boots all over again rushing to the stables. Dusk has fallen, but even with the rain, he has enough light to slip into Horse's stall. She noses at him for treats, ever the opportunist.

"There's nothing," he tells her, stifled. "Nothing for us here. It's gonna be a long road home."

_ Home. _ He uses the word because it's a shorthand, he supposes. The walls of Kaer Seren will shelter them and any others who may come, but the keep doesn't have the sound of _ home _to it anymore. No place does.

There was a phantom in the window the morning he was taken away. Early, early in the biting dawn, with spring barely on the way. His sister pressed her nose to the pane, awake against their parents' strictures, and watched the witcher lift Alec to the saddle behind him and ride away. Her breath danced white as a nightwraith's sleeve on the glass.

His mother's room. The only one with glass windows in the house.

The only sounds around him are made by the animals. He buries his face against Horse's neck. What is he doing? He has his rules: Take only jobs you trust enough. Honour your word. Keep your head down.

Don't start fights with cocky strangers just because they prod at the things you hide.

Long-suffering, Horse waits for his breathing to calm, then shifts away to chomp on her hay. He should get some sleep. Tomorrow he'll have to see what he can get out of the local blacksmith with his few remaining crowns.

*

A slice of lantern light brings Alec out of a restless doze. He's slept in worse places than sitting up next to his snuffling horse, under his cloak, but he can't settle.

The lantern is hung on a peg next to the stall, and Alec starts as a sloshing skin, closed with a carved bone stopper, is tossed at his feet.

"What the fuck," he says, flat, and glowers.

"A peace offering," says the Cat witcher, slouching over the stall door. "You left your pint behind, so I brought you a replacement. Not that horse piss Willem likes to sell as ale, either."

"How about _ you _ piss off? Haven't you got a contract to get to?" Alec takes the skin, planning to chuck it right back. It smells faintly of honey, with none of the sour tint of the watery ale.

"That rather is the trouble. May I?" The bolt on the stall rattles. Alec springs onto his feet to cut the man off before he can trammel him in, and pushes into the aisle. His unwanted companion bares his palms in acquiescence, shaking his head. This time, his shirt is laced, with a snug-fitting leather vest buckled over it. Water beads in his hair and runs in rivulets down his cheeks.

"Fine." Alec sighs, shoving the skin into the man's chest. "Talk fast."

"Sure you don't want any?" The man tugs the stopper off with his teeth. "Won't have to fear losing your wits, this is mild as a maiden in springtime."

"I'll pass."

The man takes a swig. "This merchant and his mysterious beast. I looked at the evidence, and I know what it is. It's not a job for one hunter. It comes from the northeast, the highlands, which means going behind Redanian lines, such as they are."

"Look, I don't know what kind of manners they teach in Cat School training, but this is a pretty sorry showing if you want my _ help_." Alec tries not to sound petulant. He can't read the moment. The rough innuendo of their first meeting is gone from the man, in favour of something more subtle and sombre.

"I brought the mead." A wisping laugh. Even Alec can hear the self-irony.

This time, Alec takes the skin from the offering hand. "So, what is it, this monster?"

"You help me, I'll tell you."

Alec drinks, out of some twisted principle, and the mead is silky and bittersweet in his mouth. He pauses to swallow. "I can't promise my help if I don't know what you're chasing."

"As if you don't do that every time you swear to some desperate village elder that you'll deliver them from the horrors in the night. 'A witcher's word is his solemn oath', isn't that a Griffin tenet? You're the school with the actual code."

Alec's been told a few stories, too. "The way I hear it, yours has no honour at all."

To his astonishment, the man throws his head back and laughs. There's no mirth to the sound, only a bone-dry rattle of sarcasm. "You hear right, my friend."

"Then you should know I'm not your friend, and won't be." _ You're not a hero, Alec. _ He can hear Master Hodge's last gravelly wisdom. _ You're a professional. Mind yourself. _

"I'm quite amazed," the man says, bracing his elbow on the stall door, "at how many wrong steps I've managed to take with you when we've barely spoken a hundred words. Allow me one question?"

"You're going to ask anyway."

"Why do you think I followed you here?"

"I don't know, even the mummers tired of your jokes?" Unwilling to either keep the mead skin or pass it back, Alec flings it onto a peg on the wall. An unquiet shudder prickles his palms, tension building with nowhere to go.

"Most of the men in that room _ would _have cracked my face on the table for saying to them what I said to you." For the first time, the man's face reveals something like hesitation. Alec doesn't intrude on his pause—his own mind is working too hard—and so he squares himself, broad shoulders and lithe frame in alignment, and says, "I'm Magnus. Most recently of Novigrad."

Alec should clasp his wrist, but Magnus doesn't extend his hand. He forces down the old terror in his throat. "You _ wanted _me to hit you?"

"I trust my reflexes better than that." It doesn't sound like a brag. Alec believes it: any witcher worth their swords moves twice as fast as a trained soldier. The Trial changes more than your senses, if you live through it. "I can't take this contract alone. If we succeed, there's enough coin in it to see me back to Novigrad and you wherever you're headed for the snows. But I can't work with someone that's undone by a few japes, when I might place my life in your hands."

Alec exhales in a rush. He's not sure he grasps everything here, but his wariness eases. "I walked out on you."

"Apprehension is not the same thing as hatred," Magnus says. Then, uninvited, he cants up to peer at Alec's face. Alec's cheeks have time to go hot before he steps back. "There's green in your eyes. Is that a Griffin feature?"

"I think it's just me." Alec resists the urge to squeeze his eyes shut. Most witchers' eyes turn some shade of yellow, so the striated hazel hue has got him a few uncomfortable comments.

"It suits you." As if Alec had taken care to fit together his old leathers or his plain boots or his much-darned second shirt. However rough Magnus's edges are, he looks like an imperial destrier next to a village plough horse compared to Alec. Alec still hopes he doesn't plan to wear all that jewellery on the hunt.

He doesn't know what to do with his hands, so he takes the skin and a draught of the mead that's entirely too fine for this tumbledown roadside inn. It seems natural enough to let Magnus drink a mouthful, too.

Horse interrupts them by pushing at Magnus's back. He touches the side of her head. "Hello, beautiful. Best not get too close. I think your master mistrusts me."

"If you want me, she comes, too," Alec says, a little too fast and loud. "She might not look like it, but she's trained for the hunt. Won't spook at anything less than a fiend. If you need an archer, I'm a much better one on her back."

Because Magnus apparently just is like that, he finds a slice of dried apple somewhere on his person, and Horse is won over before Alec can get a word in edgewise. Magnus strokes her nose with a slow hand. "Is there anything you need before we go?"

Like it were that simple. Like they've reached an agreement.

"A new whetstone," Alec says. "Horseshoes. Arrows. Medicine."

"I have a good kit," Magnus says. "We'll see if I have what you're missing. If mounted archery is your surprising forte, then alchemy is where my talents lie. Besides the obvious, of course."

Besides infuriating Alec one moment and talking him into some foolhardy collaboration the next. Besides charming the horse Alec's spent eight years training with a damned piece of fruit.

_ I wouldn't have hit you_. Alec feels the words take shape and pushes them back. _ You were saying too much. _

"What are we hunting?" he asks.

Magnus hums conspiratorially, then pulls a glossy feather nearly as long as his forearm from his sleeve. It shimmers from the deep cobalt of the tip to auburn and bronze along its length.

"A griffin," Alec says. Not easy prey, but prey he's brought down before, with planning and patience. They can get a decent price for the parts, if the kill is clean enough.

"This is _ your _ symbolic beast, and that's the extent of what you've been taught." Magnus clicks his tongue. "An _ opinicus _ griffin."

Alec's eyes widen. "You're joking."

The opinicus is a myth: a mountain creature of the tallest peaks, desired by kings and pontiffs for the breathtaking blue of its plumage, uncannily clever and elusive. Alec doesn't doubt that they exist, but not even the old warriors of Kaer Seren had ever seen one.

"The merchant's money is fair," Magnus says, "but if we find this beast, you can shoe your horse with gold and silver." His slight smile does something to Alec's heart, makes it twist and leap like a thing driven.

"I'd rather shoe her with iron, but point taken." There's more stirring Alec's thoughts than Magnus's smile. It's bound to be a dangerous venture. The highland paths are steep, but at least they'll be less wet than the bogs, which have nearly spoiled his bow as it is. The feather is from a griffin, but Alec has never seen a speck of blue on the common variety.

He has to keep his head on straight. "You're gonna show me the evidence."

"Of course." Magnus nods, sober. "We can plan more tomorrow. Keep the mead."

"You're sure?" 

"I have other plans for staying warm tonight." Magnus shrugs one shoulder, and Alec remembers the faint scars that snake across his skin under the linen and leather. "Good night, sweet stranger."

"It's Alec," he says. "My name is Alec."

"Alec," Magnus repeats. He stops, a shadow against shadows, and turns his head back over his shoulder. "I'll see you in the morning."

Once he's gone, Alec blows out the lantern, and falls asleep to the sound of the rain.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shadows from both Alec and Magnus's past complicate their budding partnership.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giant thanks to pearwaldorf for looking this over once more, to Jilly and Spoon for early encouragement and to Lynne for helping solve some Magnus problems. ♥
> 
> **Content Note**: That warning about medieval-style homophobia? Still in effect.
> 
> I know Alec's horse is probably too smart for realism. She's a super special witchering horse, just go with it.

Alec wakes up in the blue hour that heralds sunrise. Horse noses at his hair. His neck cracks as he stretches his protesting body out of the corner where he slept, propped against the wall. Somebody snores in the hay loft.

The ground is cold with dew, the yard and most of the people still asleep. Only the dawdling smell of woodsmoke tells him the kitchen fire is lit. He lets Horse to the water trough, trusting her to come at his call. The moment is chill and clear, with the last dregs of night mist rising from the fields.

The mummers' tiny caravan is parked by the side of the road, their ponies sleepily huddled together. A light in the nearest wagon catches Alec's eye. The heavy canvas cover is drawn back, leaving only a door curtain backlit by the lamp. Two people are silhouetted against the hemp, pressed together.

Alec doesn't mean to eavesdrop, but they're sort of in plain sight—and hearing, when you have ears as sharp as Alec's. There's a thrumming laugh from one of them—too low to come from a woman's throat. The curtain swishes to admit a figure past them that Alec recognises as the serving girl. She's bundling her kinked black hair up into a kerchief.

She is followed out by Magnus. He's barely in his shirt, tugging his belt tight as he goes. He has a pack slung over one shoulder, his swords over the other. On the step, he leans sideways into the person he was holding: a man, wrapped in a blanket, who cups Magnus's cheek and kisses him. It looks drowsy and familiar. Alec feels his stomach twist.

Magnus throws both of his companions a wave and wanders towards the stable. Alec could duck back inside and into the saddle room, but Horse betrays his presence, her head deep in the trough, so, caught wrong-footed, he stays where he is.

"Good morning." There are dim bruises at the base of Magnus's neck. His braid is partly unravelled, no doubt by eager, grasping fingers. "Did you sleep well, in your bed of hay?"

_ I have other plans for staying warm tonight_, Magnus said last evening—a tease, a parting shot.

His throat is soft and vulnerable above his shirt laces. The marks are telltale, those of tender teeth in the flesh. Alec bristles so he won't slip on that thought.

"Do you always avoid paying for a bed by fucking the innkeep's daughter, or was this a special occasion?"

"It was." Magnus begins to re-do his mussed braid. "I hadn't seen Augustus in years. A well-mannered witcher shouldn't gossip, but it was hardly me that did most of the ploughing. Not when there was a man of such _ merits _at hand. He's not a warrior, but he knows his way about his blade."

Alec exhales gustily. "I really don't need a rundown. I don't—I don't care what you get up to in the night, but—"

_ But if the rumours are true, they burn men in Novigrad for lying with men. _

"I can't get mixed up in your little side acts," he blurts out. Something sears him like the slow flame of a split-log fire. "If you're serious about the job, I'll go with you, but after that, I have to be on my way. It's a long ride, and the autumn's short."

"Gods forbid I find a companion with a spark of joy in his soul," Magnus says. "Is it to be all business, this venture of ours? Just the facts, bare and plain?"

"You could start by giving me some. Facts." Anything to divert Alec's mind from that Magnus just stumbled out of a three-way tryst that was at least doubly unwise. Families guard their girls with a strict eye in these parts. The old faiths of the land may not care who you bed, but the Eternal Fire does. The Redanian army has priests with them, and a whisper in the wrong ear is all it takes to set the witch hunters loose.

Alec digs his thumbnail into the side of his forefinger, a hard, grounding crescent of pain.

"I will. Don't set a fire under your ass just yet." Magnus shakes his vest and a woollen half-cloak out of his pack, and ties a patterned scarf around his neck—strategically, one could assume. "I was hoping for a bowl of comfortably unknowable pottage before we go. We'll have to take some time out of today for your purchases, anyway."

Practicalities. Alec can do those. So much better.

"About that. There should be a farrier in a village this size." He gestures to the east, where the road curls down to the crooking river and the village of Hartmoor. "Horse needs to be shod. I'm not taking any chances on these paths."

Magnus makes a guttural noise. "Correct me if I'm mistaken, but your horse is in fact called Horse."

"Yeah, she is." Alec is far past the point where this line of questions can get a rise out of him. "I was a dumb sixteen-year-old when I got her. I had to train her to come when called, and now the only word she obeys is—" he raises his voice "—Horse! Here, girl!"

Magnus watches, faintly but openly impressed, as Horse trots up to Alec.

"Does she also fetch? Roll over?"

"She kicks on command," Alec says, with some bite, and Magnus gives a startling peal of laughter.

"I'd better watch myself, I see." Just like that, Magnus slides from teasing to self-irony. "Can you bear to be seen in my company at breakfast, O noble scion of the Griffin, or shall we meet back here?"

"Just, uh, keep your breeches on and we're good." Alec has no idea where his cracked temerity comes from, but Magnus laughs again, bright and good-humoured.

They go look for breakfast.

*

Over the next hours, Alec picks up a few new morsels about his companion to be. When Magnus is not engaged in riling up the nearest poor fool, he at least puts up a facade of shrewd professionalism. The farrier looks at them both askance and grumbles as he examines Horse's hooves, but Magnus talks his price down from the first outrageous offer, his voice smooth as aged Temerian rye.

Magnus peers at Alec's selection of arrowheads, steel and silver and clay, with great interest, and Alec relaxes a little. A hunter sells him a sheaf of fletched shafts; he'll cut them and fix the heads to them himself.

"Your school's rigorous adherence to tradition allows this?" Magnus toys with one of the hollow clay heads. They're single-use, meant to be filled with poisons or potions, and Alec has precious few left. "Who ever heard of a witcher fighting with bow and arrow instead of the sword?"

"You've heard of me now," Alec says. "I... was gonna be a hunter, before I went to Kaer Seren. Never gave up the practice."

"You seem like a man who likes results, so I don't imagine you're doing this for your health. And mine is the school that believes the end justifies the means, so..."

The School of the Cat is, at best, the red-headed stepchild of the witcher traditions. Even most other witchers dismiss them as a cadre of honourless vagabonds or intemperate scrappers who'll take any job and finish it by hook or by crook. But the Cat has outlived several more respected schools, as times grow harder for their kind.

"So we should be well matched," Alec says, something of a peace offering. "Let's go get the horses."

It also turns out Magnus has no leg to stand on in the matter of naming horses. His mount is a dapple grey gelding, light-boned and high-spirited, bred somewhere far south of Velen. "And here," Magnus says, testing a saddle strap, "is the Chancellor. Let's hope he and Horse get along."

"As long as he lets her hog the treats." Alec hangs his much-suffered silver sword from the saddle. The village smith had no idea what to do about it, so he'll sharpen it as best he can and hope they won't run into anything that requires silver to kill. A griffin should fall to steel just as well.

As promised, Magnus takes Alec to the site where the merchant's caravan was attacked. Yesterday's rain and the local wildlife have begun to muck up the signs, but they tread carefully around the clearing until Alec is satisfied. The carcass of a horse has been dragged into the thicket and ripped into ravenously. He finds another couple of feathers trapped in the stinking, stiffened hide: they, too, scintillate with a blue underhue.

Magnus is waiting by the horses. He looks more the witcher now, his steel sword hung on the intricately tooled shoulder belt that wraps over his vest. He wears no armour, only supple leather boots and studded gloves. Alec would expect as much; the Cat style favours fast dodges and precise strikes.

"Satisfied?" With his elbow propped against the Chancellor's saddle, Magnus still manages to lounge.

"It's a griffin for sure," Alec says, cautious, though he can feel the palm-tingling excitement of a new hunt stirring in him. Sweet Mother, but Magnus just might be right.

"Not simply a griffin," Magnus retorts, "but I'll forgive you your doubts."

"I believe things when I see them. We can either stand here talking, or we can get closer to this mythical creature of yours while we've got daylight. You pick."

Shaking his head, Magnus pulls himself into the saddle, and they leave Hartmoor and its bend in the river behind, following the riverside road northeast.

*

"I'm curious," Magnus says, as they stop to water the horses on the second day. "Most Griffin witchers I've met have been dressed in a great deal more mail. I thought the clanking tea kettle type was more your style. And how's your Sign work?"

"I'm an archer. Mobility matters way more than armour. And my Sign work is fine." Witchers have no true magic, which is the purview of mages alone. The Trial of the Grasses imbues them with the potential to harness simple effects: setting an adversary on fire, knocking them back, or muddling their mind for a crucial moment. The Signs never quite were Alec's strong suit. "Is it my turn to ask when you're planning to stab me in the back, since you should never trust the word of a Cat bastard?"

"Oh, low blow." Magnus clicks his tongue. "Points for the wordplay, though. You slept across the fire from me and lived to see morning, no?"

"It's not really in your best interest to kill me _ before _ we've found the mark." Even in the shade of the weeping willows that crowd the stream bank, the heat of the day has found them. Alec submerges his waterskin, then empties it over his own head, leaving a damp sheen on his face.

"Well, I—" Magnus blinks, as if Alec had stymied him with this scorching remark. He finds his poise again lightning-quick. "If I meant to stab you, I'd find a more pleasant way to do it than a quick poke in the dark."

It's been like this for the past day. In addition to his silver tongue and his uncanny affinity for Alec's prize horse, Magnus seems to excel at turning everything into an innuendo. By now, Alec manages to roll his eyes and change the subject most of the time.

He's been on the receiving end of lewd banter before. There's always the odd person that finds a witcher alluring rather than frightening. Alec's seen his own face, strong-featured and mostly unscarred, in cloudy mirrors and still waters; it must look fine to somebody's eye.

The spring he and his peers first rode out from Kaer Seren, he got, at the urging of his friends, so far as a brothel bed and an apple-cheeked girl with a husky laugh. The first was rouge and the second a strained pretence, and in the end he bolted without even touching her.

He sat on the roof of an empty building until dawn. Once he met up with his friends, he mumbled an awkward lie that they swallowed whole, heady with their youth and boldness and the brothel's awful ale.

There are places where you can find men as well as women, trading an effigy of love for crowns. Alec knows enough to understand this. But witchers take no spouses. They can have no children. The mutations of the Trial lengthen their lives beyond the normal human span, and so the only permanent things for them are the fellowship of their kind and the long and winding Path. The way Magnus speaks of lust, of the act of love, gregarious and free, unsettles Alec in a way he can't quiet.

"How did you end up here?" he asks, to break off his bemusement. "I mean, on the Path. I know your school travels all over."

"Ah, the _ Path_." Magnus enunciates so the _ p _ pops drily. "The glorious work of a witcher. My mother was a noblewoman, my father a Zerrikanian merchant prince _ not _espoused to my mother. Her husband, on the other hand, wanted to be rid of the shameful by-blow—that is to say, me—so he sold me to the Cat caravan." He pulls on the Chancellor's reins, and they turn back towards the road. It's become more of a footpath, but wide enough for them to walk abreast, with the horses trailing them.

"What was it like?" Alec drops his voice, though Magnus's timbre is perfectly nonchalant. "We mostly sat tight in Kaer Seren and studied. You saw a lot more of the world."

"Wonderful, obviously. So much obscure lore crammed endlessly into your head. In ten years, you'll hunt in the dark like an owl, but now, it's two hundred more sword forms before breakfast. You know what it was like," Magnus says. "All witcher training is alike."

"You sound sorta bitter."

Magnus chuckles, rasping, like he seems to when something puts a notch in his shifting facade. "No. I loved it. It was freedom. It gave me... means. The power to make my own way."

Alec can't think of anything to say to that, so they amble in silence for a while. It's too hot to press the horses for long, but the trees shield them from the worst of the swelter. The path scratches and rustles under their passage.

"What about you?" Magnus is scanning their surroundings in an idle way, his eyes moving across the foliage, brought alive by a restless breeze. "What's your story?"

"The Law of Surprise," Alec says. "That's what my teachers told me, anyway. You know, the Trial, it can mess with your memory. I'm surprised you remember that clearly."

"Surely you know the School of the Cat uses different formulas for the Trial." Magnus grins, but it seems hollow. His eyes are hooded by some hidden sentiment. "We don't think of emotions or worldly ties as a hindrance, so we don't throttle them."

Alec has heard this before, the idea that the Trial carves something out of the witchers, scoops out the core of what makes them human. It's a common enough superstition, but he's not sure how he would test the truth of it.

He doesn't want to think about it, so he goes on, "A witcher saved my father's life. My father couldn't pay him, so he called on the Law of Surprise. And my father gave him the first thing that came to meet him when he returned home."

"You." Magnus has shed his jewellery, but he rubs his thumb across his forefinger and the band of an absent ring. "I've met a few other children who were brought in this way. It's a harsh way to exact payment, but I suppose payment must be had. We all depend on that compact."

Alec doesn't think he could accept sympathy. This is something different: acknowledgment. Magnus _ understands_, in a way only another witcher could. Many initiates are orphans or bastards. Some were wanted and loved by their families once, but the world is not gentle.

"Yeah," he says. "I was eight or so. I don't remember their faces anymore."

Magnus's hand flickers in the air, then retreats to his side. "There's open ground ahead. I have a fancy to see if your Horse can keep up with the Chancellor."

"That sounds like a challenge." Alec hollers for Horse. Raising her head from the beggartick leaves she's eating, she clambers back to the path. "Loser gets firewood for the rest of the trip."

"Cocksure. I like that." Magnus is barely trying, and yet Alec almost appreciates it. "It doesn't, of course, change the fact that we're going to utterly trounce you."

*

The mystery of the Chancellor's origin is this, as told that evening by Magnus over the fire Alec gathered and built: he is an Ofiri racehorse, bred for a great southern ruler. He was gelded for his imperfect colouring, fog-grey rather than pure white, and sold to a merchant going north. Magnus solved a beast-related problem for the merchant and was given the horse for his service.

" 'A beast-related problem'? That's coy of you." Alec has his arrow-making kit spread out in the firelight, and a growing pile of finished arrows next to him. "I thought every job you took was an improbable feat of some kind."

"Only when I'm wooing someone into buying me rounds." Magnus is at his ease, leaned against a moss-striated rock in the forest hollow where they camped. "Most of it is common drudgery, as you know. See posting, dig up client in some backwater, hunt for clues, set ambush, kill things. Collect payment, if you're lucky."

"If you're lucky," Alec says, equal parts glum and wry. "You ever done anything else? Served as some lordling's bodyguard? Cheated at cards? I'm not judging. You've got to eat somehow."

"Mmm." Magnus stretches the sound out until it's either pensive or a touch obscene. "There was a lady in Novigrad whose bed I warmed for a winter. She thought it an advantage to tumble a man who couldn't get her with child. She was charming when she wanted to, and I got besotted. More the fool I, in the end."

Alec mumbles, "I regret asking."

"But you did ask," Magnus shoots back. "You, I suppose, have never strayed an inch from the Path."

"No, I—" Alec slots the last arrowhead onto a shaft and presses it down so the glue takes. "I've pretty much earned my keep with literal swordwork."

"By the Crone's tits. Was that a joke?"

"With you, it seems best to specify."

Alec can estimate threat: who to avoid, who to intimidate, who to speak softly to. Magnus often leaves him at a loss. Just when he feels cornered, Magnus relents. Magnus laughs at him, but also with him, and appears pleased every time Alec jabs back at him.

Then there's the confusing simmer of ribald quips and hints that should be a warning, a reason to keep away. Alec's used to being alone. Opening up is too much of a gamble, even though Magnus is affable and more than a little kind.

"Very well." Magnus gestures grandly with the stick he's using as a fire poker. "If you're so concerned for your virtue, put your sword between us. I swear not to try and ravish you in the night."

Alec groans, mostly for effect, and puts away his arrows and tools. His bedroll is laid out near the fire, his cloak on top of the blanket pile. The days still court summer, but the nights already belong to autumn.

"I'm going to sleep," he declares. "Horse will warn us if there's somebody about."

"I'm mostly worried about Redanian stragglers or deserters." Magnus adds wood to the fire, to keep it burning low and steady and smoking little. If it gets any colder, they'll need to seek or build shelter; now, sleeping under the stars is viable. "It's not as if we make plump targets for robbery, but those soldiers have got lean and hungry."

"How about when we get back? Assuming everything goes well."

"We can circle to the north and go to Oxenfurt. I have a—contact there who can help us sell the spoils. Is it far out of your way?"

"A bit," Alec says, "but I know the way."

As well as he knows any way in the world. When all roads are essentially the same, does it matter which one you take?

"Sweet dreams, then," Magnus says, back to that insufferable lightness. "I thought I'd go look at the moon for a bit."

"Don't ogle it so hard you trip and fall in the river. If you die, I'm selling your horse."

Magnus affects a deeply offended scoff, just before his quiet laughter bubbles into the air.

Kicking off his boots, Alec pulls his blankets over his head. His swords stay under his pack, his hand rested on the hilt of one. Sleep finds him swiftly, untroubled by dreams.

*

Magnus comes back late, his soft steps snagging at the hem of Alec's sleep. He builds up the fire, and the rustling heat at his side is Alec's last waking impression.

At first light, Alec leaves Magnus to sleep, grabs his sword, and finds a patch of level ground. He's been slacking in his daily exercises ever since Hartmoor, so he spins himself studiously through the core forms to warm up. As his body wakes to the effort, he quickens his steps and strikes, duelling his own shadow with a rare pleasure in his own control and prowess. This was his favourite part of the day in training: the afternoon hour when Master Hodge let them pair up and run free with their wooden practice swords.

It used to remind him of another fenced yard, shadowed by old elms and oaks rather than stone walls. He and his brother would battle with sticks, pretending they were knights or bandits, or maybe elven rebels—

He's being watched.

Only an elven rebel would be able to sneak up on a witcher—save for another witcher, perhaps one from the school infamous for its clandestine ways. Magnus melts out of the tree shadows, his hair in a messy, loose tail, his sheathed sword in hand. The green-gold light turns him a little eerie. Alec's breath is rough in his throat.

"Say something next time." He blusters. "I was about to run you through."

"Not that easily, greenhorn," Magnus says, blithe. "That is some fine form, though. Can I interest you in a bit of swordplay? For you, I'll even leave my clothes on."

"Can't really afford to lose another bet to you, unless I want to be doing all the camp chores by the end of the hunt."

"No bets, then. Just a friendly spar before we leave."

Alec flicks his blade into the air, holds his breath for the split second that it spins around itself, and catches the hilt solidly in his palm. "You know how to pull your blows."

"I've quite likely been at this longer than you've been alive. Have a little faith."

Alec has no time to dissect this statement before Magnus tosses the scabbard from his sword and flies merrily at his unprotected left.

*

The sun is high and storm clouds gather to the south by the time they get under way. Despite the humid omen of thunder, they make fair time, and around noon the land takes on a tamer aspect, the stretches of forest broken by fields and orchards.

Alec is still in a buoyant mood, loose-limbed from their bout. While Magnus backed him into a tree a couple of times and disarmed him once, Alec also got in a few good strikes of his own. It's been a long time since he's used his skills for anything so close to _ fun_.

Magnus, several horse lengths ahead, sours his spirits with two words. "Redanian banners."

"Shit." Alec pulls Horse to a stop at the top of the shallow rise, next to Magnus and the Chancellor. "Should we go around? I was hoping to buy food, but there's plenty of game in the woods. It'll just delay us some."

A haphazard encampment indeed covers a fallow field below the village proper. The tents have barely even seen a straight line, but Alec can count soldiers in their dozens.

The custom in the Northern Kingdoms is that witchers are not bound to serve in armies. It'd take a fool to try and forcibly recruit one, too. That doesn't mean they're safe from having their horses or provisions confiscated, and armed resistance won't go over well.

"Mostly I'm curious if our griffin has been this way," Magnus says. "It clearly doesn't fear people much, and those are sheep pastures uphill of the village. Here's what I suggest: you take the horses and go around, and I go and cast a look about the village."

"You?" Alec can't help but gesture at Magnus. "With your... everything. Sorry, but you're not exactly unmemorable."

"Why, thank you. No, I was planning on a different set of everything. Sometimes it pays to hide your true colours." Magnus opens a saddle bag. "Be a dear and find me a fallen branch or a sapling. Sound wood, about my height, that should do."

Alec has not been anybody's dear in his _ life_, but he dismounts, half just to see what ridiculous theatrics he's about to witness. They lead the horses down a deer path, away from the road.

When Alec gets back, cracking twigs and leaves from a stout, gently curved length of oak, Magnus has transformed, or nearly so. He's wearing a rough woollen robe and a rope belt hung with bird bones, pouches and knickknacks. His hair is hidden by a peasant's cap, and his well-tended leather pack rubbed with dirt. His swords are stowed in their straps in the Chancellor's saddle.

"Yes, that's good." Magnus nods his approval, then holds out a strip of linen. "Help me tie this over my eyes."

"What are you supposed to be? A blind pellar?"

"Quite so." Magnus turns so that Alec can knot the linen behind his head. The weave looks thin enough that he'll be able to see through it, if dimly. "The herbal knowledge is real, I have the sagacious voice down, and a wandering healer is both harmless and welcome in most places."

"What about the _ Redanians_?" Alec hisses. "You're walking in there, a witcher in disguise as a wise man. If they've got a priest with the thinnest fanatic streak in that camp..."

"That camp that the villagers are tolerating for now. This is a rear guard, Alec. There are sick-tents down there. At worst, their surgeons will steal my remedies, and I'm leaving the better part of them with you."

"Fine." Alec fights the urge to grab Magnus by the arm, to lead him away. They do need information, and more grain and vegetables would not hurt. Living on meat alone gets miserable quickly. Practicalities, again. "I'll see you behind the sheep pastures by midnight. If not—"

"I know, I know," Magnus says, "you'll sell my horse. Just don't give him away for cheap."

*

The wait drags worse than any Alec has endured when laying traps for elusive marks. He leaves the horses saddled and tethers the Chancellor so they can graze well in cover of the woods. He strings his bow, then crawls up to the craggy peak of the hill that marks the edge of the pastures.

The sheep cluster, smudges of black and brown, into the sheepfold in the meadow. The fires of the village make a smoky haze above the thatched roofs. The harvest is winding to an end: Alec spots people with scythes at the easternmost edge of the settlement.

People come and go. Cows are herded home for milking. The moon appears late, dwindled by one night from its full gold-crown glory. 

What if Magnus does not return? Does Alec really plan to sneak into the village, with scores of soldiers a stone's throw away, for the sake of a man he's known for three days and who's annoyed him at least for a solid two of them?

He can take his chances with the griffin. He can sell Magnus's beautiful horse and run back to Kaer Seren on the profits.

While he's at it, he can let the memory of Magnus's surprised laughs and the effortless grace of his being, like he knows exactly where he fits in the world, haunt him forever.

Someone moves, low to the ground, across the meadow. Alec squints. The shape resolves itself into a dun robe and a pack hanging on its back, and Alec slides down from his perch with such haste that he sends pebbles rolling along the rocks.

"Magnus." He doesn't bother to swallow his elated sigh.

"I'm here." Magnus, too, sounds out of breath. He's lost his makeshift pellar's staff somewhere. "I found something you need to see. Step easy. I saw two village boys making their rounds around the pasture, but I don't think they've come across this yet."

He leads Alec along the tumbledown stone wall that's meant to keep the sheep from the forest. They work their way into a gorge between two hillocks, framed by exposed tree roots, and Alec smells the thick tang of blood and dead meat that have cooked in the sun for a while.

"You found another kill."

"From this morning, I believe. If memory serves, opinici hunt in the twilight." Magnus has wrapped up the clinking trinkets on his belt, but he detaches a small copper lantern and lights it with a Sign, a flicker of his fingers through a triangle shape. Alec's never had the precision for anything less than a campfire. He's melted enough candles into lumps of tallow to know that.

In the increased light, the fate of the stray sheep is even more grisly. There's little left of the body but the bones, horns and hooves. The beast has gorged itself. Alec tugs at the remainders of the hide along the sheep's back.

"Magnus," he says. The air is suddenly heavy to breathe. "The claw marks. Look at the direction of them."

He can see the same in the bones, the strained and cracked vertebrae. The sheep's been torn two ways. Alec plucks the flaky shell of a sturdy foreclaw from the ribs: griffins, like cats, shed their claws in layers.

Looking up at Magnus, he can tell that this is what Magnus wanted him to confirm. "There's two of them."

"They mate for life," Magnus says, intent with held-back possibility. "You might not think so in these boglands, but it's been a dry summer, so there must have been no prey for them in the mountains. The wild goats and deer have come down after food."

"And they were here less than a day ago."

Two opinici, stealing sheep. Who ever heard of such a thing?

This is the sort of job that circulates in drunken legends. That you dream of when the wandering life is at its worst and a season spent in one place, under a real roof, seems like the answer to your every prayer. Alec forces himself to check the rest of the site: he finds a distinct paw print in giving soil, and a few airy, gleaming feathers fluttering in the tree roots. The earth has been gouged up by the griffins in their feeding.

"We need a vantage point." Magnus brings him back from his soaring thoughts. "The ground rises to the north."

"Uh, there's a deserted Temerian outpost that way. I haven't been there, but it's on my map, and the map's been good so far. With a bit of luck, they have a watchtower standing that we can borrow."

If possible, they need to see the griffins in flight. If there is a nest, it'll be in the sheer upper slopes, but the griffins use this area as their hunting ground. They can lay a trap in a suitable spot as soon as they have a better idea of where the beasts roam.

"Is that optimism I hear in your tone?" Magnus says. "Count me shocked."

"I don't put much stock in luck, but—" Alec's laugh dies on his tongue. "Put out the light. I heard something."

A chatter of poorly hushed voices is drawing closer. As soon as the lantern is out and his eyes adjust, Alec sees another winking point of fire in the pasture below.

"The shepherds." Magnus scuffs his foot across their tracks. "We should not be seen here."

"How was the village?" They climb out of the gorge at the end that cleaves into the woods, kicking down loose soil to hide their passage.

"Ordinary. Tense. You were right, though, about the Redanians." Magnus speaks low. "It's an infirmary camp. They're too weak and few to be a real threat to the people, but their shadow is long. I could barely get anyone to talk to me, let alone to ask for healing."

"Would you have helped? If somebody had asked?" Alec didn't really think about that.

"Of course. Or, as much as you can expect a blind man to do in an evening."

Even in the rush of this new revelation about their prey, that catches Alec squarely. Magnus is so ready to play up the dastardly reputation of his witcher tradition, and yet Alec can't find it in himself to doubt his words.

Magnus is getting ahead, oblivious to Alec's sudden dilemma. Alec musters himself and moves on, subtly as he can, through the underwood.

*

They get turned around in the moonlit forest a time or two before finding the road again. To their good fortune—and grief—the thunderstorm finally rumbles in. They spend a wet night under Alec's oiled tarp, which has seen better days, but keeps them from being utterly soaked. The rain muddies up the soil and conceals the more blatant signs of their presence.

They push the horses on through a gloomy morning. The clouds scatter only for another bank to build on the southern horizon. As the terrain grows more sparse, spruce and rambling pine are sprinkled in among the mighty broadleaf trees, which gradually shrink in size.

Magnus did manage to fill their provisions. There isn't a twig of dry wood to be found, so Magnus spends a while each night pouring handfuls of magical fire onto sodden branches until they ignite.

Twice, they come across fresh signs of others camping by the narrow road. Habitation trickles out into single homesteads, hemmed by fire-fallow fields burned into the forest.

At Magnus's insistence, they turn to the animal paths. Alec isn't quite sure whether he fears pursuit or simply robbers desperate enough to chance attacking a pair of witchers. The horses bear up under the strain, but Alec worries for them more than for Magnus or himself. A thrown shoe is one thing, but the trails hide slick stones, roots, and even deadfalls. Still, they don't see anybody, and give a berth to the occasional lines of smoke that drift up from the blanket of trees.

Two dreary, rainy days pass like this.

On the third, their course loops back to the river they followed out from Hartmoor. The wind races wild across the treetops and brightens the sky. When, some time after noon, they happen upon an abandoned water mill, its wheel turning creakily in the current, they halt by tacit agreement. The horses have been lagging all day. Between them, they have barely any dry clothes left, and Alec is frankly sore from too much time in the saddle and sleeping in the damp. Even Magnus has lost his lively powers of conversation—they've all focused on covering distance.

The mill has been emptied by its owners or by scavengers. Cavalierly, Alec takes apart a few dusty wooden crates left inside the doorway, while Magnus settles the horses in the cart shelter leaned against one wall of the building. When their mounts are tended to, Alec lights a fire in the brick hearth in the central room of the mill. It may be a risk, but they need the heat, and a proper meal.

"I'm gonna see if I can get a hare or bird for the pot." His bow survived the rains intact once more. It must be a blessing from the Mother at this juncture, though Alec has not kept up his devotions in any kind of way. "Keep the fire going."

This the most he's said to Magnus yet today. With peculiar quickness, they've fallen into each other's patterns: who cooks, who dries and brushes the horses, who takes first watch, what small and crucial thing needs to be fixed or mended. In the circumstances, Alec is chiefly thankful.

"I will." Magnus is hanging their collective blankets on the low beams under the ceiling. "Though, while I'm at it, I'm taking a damned bath. The river can't be that cold yet."

"It comes from the mountains, it's gonna be cold. Didn't get enough of being soaked in the last couple of days?"

"There is a difference between being wet and being clean."

"Sure." Magnus does have a point. Alec would rather wash _ after _he's hunted, and maybe he should give Magnus a moment alone. They've hardly broken company for the whole of their arduous trek here.

Alec shoulders his bow and goes.

He dives into the gusty coolness of the forest, lets the wind dry his shirt, and even allows himself to rove. He's always loved the woods, the brimming, secret lives of them, the green weight of the trees. Tufts of blueberry here and there still bear a late bounty of shade-sweetened berries. Soon enough, a noise he makes spooks a grouse into flight from the forest floor, and a sure shot drops it back to the ground.

Once he has a second bird down, he heads back, with a measure of reluctance. Magnus has been tetchy about _something_, and though Alec isn't as agitated, it's better to be safe than sorry. They're in terrain unfamiliar to them both.

A stone bridge spans the river beside the mill. Just upstream of it, a cove of sorts has formed into the riverbed, protected by rocks that divert the current around the still waters. Hugging the opposite bank, dense with young aspen and willow, Alec ventures towards the bridge.

The brisk splash of a body into the water, then an ensuing, laughtery gasp, make him halt.

He peers through the leaves, and his breath cinches into a tight shiver.

He should not be here. He should be anywhere but here, watching Magnus wade back to the rock where he's left his sword, a box of soap, and a bundle of clothes. His hair is free and dripping, sticking to the back of his neck. Water runs down the wide slope of his back, outlining the supple play of his muscles. A thin, deep scar curves along the inside of his left shoulder-blade and down to just above the buttock, like the frozen lash of a whip. The thickness of the pale tissue is evident in its subtle pull on the smooth brown skin surrounding it.

Alec's seen Magnus; not naked, but in states of partial undress, because camp life doesn't offer much privacy. This is entirely different from an errant glimpse of bare skin.

He's heart-stoppingly beautiful, agile and strong under the sunlight. Alec feels wayward desire take root in his gut. He's barely dared to name the feeling, though it's scraped at him since he first looked up at Magnus.

And Magnus does not know he's here.

It's that thought that breaks the enchantment. Alec retreats along his own tracks, clutching the grip of his bow, trying to tamp down the damning awareness flaring through him.

_ You want him. You want him and it is wrong, it's what got you sent away, why nobody would fight for you when— _

Something surfaces, old and black and stifling against the warm want. It catches him under the heart like a muffled blow and he nearly staggers with it. He finds himself leaned against a tree, his hair snatching on the knots of the bark. _ Breathe, Alec. Nobody knows. You're safe. _

_ They build pyres in Novigrad for people like you. _

_ You've been careful. You're always careful. You're safe. _

He's not sure how long he stands there. Maybe the shadows move. Maybe Magnus has heard him and is coming to check on him. Maybe time passes him by, leaves him aside, until the dread lets him up from its hold.

Then Magnus shouts, hoarse and furious, echoing from the wooded bank.

*

It's only the old instincts hammered into him in training that keep Alec from bolting straight to the bridge. The vegetation gives him no sight line across the river, but he can hear a struggle, and Horse's distressed neighing from the mill. A crossbow snicks and thrums, and Alec's heart skips with fear. Gods, if Magnus is still in the water—

Magnus thought somebody was on their trail. Alec shakes off everything he's carrying but his bow and quiver, and nocks an arrow. His hunting knife is strapped to his leg, but he left his swords at the mill. The aspen trees shiver and sway, covering the small noise of his movements. Something hits the water, a hard, uncontrolled smack, and Magnus yells again, overcome by the sounds of other voices.

When Alec sidles up to the end of the bridge, there's a man with a cocked crossbow at the other end. Tautly silent, Alec circles around the abutment, away from the crossbowman, for a view of the cove.

A man in leathers stumbles up from the water with a ferocious splutter. Another, also armed with a crossbow, takes aim from the shore at Magnus, who's naked and unarmed, up to his knees in the stream. Alec would guess he just knocked the sopping wet soldier away with a Sign.

Magnus's sword is on the rock behind him, out of reach.

Redanian soldiers. Probably not deserters; they're all in green and brown and have stained their faces for camouflage—a scout unit—but their armour matches. The soaked man is holding an arming sword of standard Redanian make.

"Just ploughing shoot him!" The man doesn't look too eager for another go at Magnus. The problem with Signs, though, is that they're not lightly cast. Using too many too fast saps your strength in a trice.

"The captain wants him alive," says the crossbowman on the shore.

"Oh, please, try," Magnus cuts in, as if he weren't besieged by three trained soldiers, swamped in the river, and horribly vulnerable. "Take another step and I'll boil your in your cuirass like soup in a skin."

"There you are." A fourth voice sounds, and Alec hunches deeper into the waterside bushes. He almost has a clean shot at the crossbowman, but the one on the bridge can put a bolt in Magnus before Alec can pick off the rest.

The fourth man, striding up from the mill, wears a captain's pauldron and an open-faced helm, and a darkened steel breastplate in lieu of the boiled leather on his soldiers. His voice is casually derisive, but dark menace bleeds through. "I thought I recognised your old tricks, but the fancy horse confirms it. Magnus Bane. The Cat of Vizima. Caught with his prick limp and his blade out of hand."

"Blackwell," Magnus says, with gritty candour. "What hole in the ground did you crawl out of?"

Magnus puts up a fine front of bravado. Alec sees his shoulders tighten, even as he continues, "A captain, is it? For Redania this time! Last I saw you, you were serving Nilfgaard. You've traded hubris for madness, an emperor for a king. Rather sounds like you stumbled on the narrow path to glory."

"You're a murderer and a mongrel, Bane." Blackwell draws his sword with something like relish in the gesture. Magnus would only need a good lunge sideways to get his own blade. He doesn't have that instant. "I'm taking you in. The Inquisitor will pay a hefty sum for you, and more when he hears about your more _ interesting _trespasses."

Upon a closer look, Blackwell is not in the common armour of the Redanians. He must be a mercenary in the army's service, probably with his own company. Alec has no room for the subtleties of the situation, not when _ the Inquisitor _fills his mind with white-glowing alarm. An official of the Eternal Fire.

The men mean to take Magnus alive. That only matters if there's a more hideous fate in store for him later.

The soldier Magnus threw in the river is edging closer. Magnus's left hand flexes in warning, but he's angled towards Blackwell. Alec thinks he sees a shiver ripple down his frame. The water must be chilly, and the brisk air isn't helping.

Alec has to do something.

"How many men are you willing to give for that cause?" Magnus cocks his chin up. "I'd say you didn't bring nearly enough. Do they know you don't care for them one whit, as long as you get to clap me in chains? The one rogue in all Vizima who slipped every little trap you could lay."

"I had you once," Blackwell says. "Left a lasting mark on you, too."

The shiver in Magnus's spine turns into a shudder, and for the first time, his inhalation betrays a fragment of terror.

Blackwell smiles, a cruel, twisting thing. "You do remember. That's kind."

_ I might put my life in your hands_. Alec hears the echo of Magnus's words, on that first night when they were setting snappish terms. It seems very long ago. There's a gap in the bushes to his immediate right. It places Magnus perilously close to his aiming line, but it will let him fire from some cover.

Going on one knee by the waterline, Alec draws his bow. Steady, steady.

"You're a worm," Magnus says, ragged. "You think you're a serpent, but—"

With a sudden snarl, Blackwell rushes at him.

"Magnus, _ get down_!" Alec shouts, and he can't hold to see if Magnus obeys, because his target is in motion. The arrow whisks away in a sharp, deadly leap, and sinks into flesh with a satisfying thud. A great splash shatters the river's surface. The soldiers call out in confusion and alarm. Alec dashes around to the top of the bridge as a crossbow bolt sails barely over his head.

He loosens another arrow with the merest aim, only aware of the figure of the crossbowman stationed on the bridge. His shot goes wide, only grazing the soldier's arm, and then the man snags at the sword at his belt and closes with Alec. Alec has about ten strides of distance between them.

Enough for him to focus and dig into the deep, queasy place within himself that links him to the crude magic at his disposal. He curls his fingers into the right rough shape and slams a stupefying Sign into the man's face. While the soldier teeters, his eyes rolling back into his head, Alec grabs him by the neck and his thick belt and pitches him over the bridge railing.

He straightens himself from that effort just as Magnus bursts from the river at the cove. Spitting and gasping, Magnus flings himself over to his sword and wrenches it free, sweeping the rest of his things into the water.

Blackwell still stands, Alec's arrow stuck in his right shoulder. It's pierced the leather pauldron and the joint underneath, and the arm dangles useless. The captain and his soldier come at Magnus from opposing sides, even as, behind them, the archer is reloading his crossbow.

Magnus ducks under Blackwell's veering left-handed swing, striving for the shore. His next stroke rings off from the captain's breastplate, thwarted by a bad angle. Magnus has the advantage of a longer blade, but he's slowed by his plunge into the near-icy water.

_ I didn't hit him_, Alec realises. That belated gut punch will not matter if he lets Magnus be overwhelmed. Stooped double so he can stay behind the railing, he scampers over the bridge. He can't get the crossbowman cleanly across the staggering, whirling melee that's moving to firmer ground. The horses are dragging on their reins, stoked into a fright by the sounds of fighting and the absence of their riders.

At the corner of the mill, mindful that Blackwell may have more men about, Alec lifts his bow again.

The shaft lances into the second archer's temple. He collapses in a clatter of spilled bow and bolts, and in the same moment, Magnus thrusts his sword into his fellow soldier's side, through the cuirass and into the heart. The blade slides out in a gush of dark red, dripping onto the sand as Magnus whirls on the wounded captain. Magnus's expression is—warped, that is the only word for it, all traces of his glimmering humour scoured away.

"You brought a friend, Bane." Blackwell shifts his footings, his eyes flickering to Alec and then back to Magnus. "He's a pretty one. You liked them pretty, didn't you? Like the one that finally squealed on where you were hiding, what was his name—"

Magnus moves like a striking wildcat. His bare feet kick up a gout of sand, and then he's upon the captain, his hand on his chest, magic crackling in the air like the scent of lightning on the tongue. Blackwell's breastplate crunches. His ribs snap and splinter, as the force of the Sign throws him backwards. He lands midway between Magnus and Alec, exhales long and rattling, and lies still.

"That name," Magnus mutters, "is not for your mouth. Not his name. Not any of their names, you piece of filth."

Alec almost lets himself reel. Violence is like this: you don't think about it while it happens, while things or people die by your hand, and only the end of the battle shocks you back into yourself. Once they were out of the initial deadlock, the tide turned. The soldiers were ordinary men. They died easy.

The horses shift and whinny skittishly. The bodies need to be done away with. Alec has no idea how these men ended up pursuing them—that answer lies with Magnus, if anywhere. But no more attackers appear, and the vicinity falls quiet.

Ponderously, Magnus crouches down, his head bowed, his arms wrapped around himself. He lets his sword clang to the ground from his grasp. Not like a man who just killed another with utter sangfroid and no little brutality.

Alec goes inside, tugs down the driest blanket he can find, and steps cautiously closer to Magnus. "Are you all right?"

Magnus gives him a halting, bruised look. "I'm wretchedly cold. And alive. Largely thanks to you."

He accepts the blanket as Alec drapes it around him, and pulls it tighter by trembling fistfuls. Alec can't ask his questions now. Magnus needs a warm fire, dry clothes, and hot food, at least as far as things Alec can provide are concerned.

"Are you?" Magnus sets one knee to the ground to steady himself. His eyes find Alec's face and stay, narrow with the faint effort of studying him.

"Not a scratch on me." Alec shakes his head for emphasis. "Got lucky."

"I thought you weren't a great proponent of luck." Slipping a hand out of the blanket, Magnus touches it to Alec's cheek. Alec grimaces, on reflex, and then relaxes. Magnus's breath rasps with something raw as Alec closes his eyes, folding into the brittle calm of the moment.

"M'not. I think it's more you. You make me believe in strange things."

"I'm not sure whether to be flattered or offended by that." Magnus's fingers sink into Alec's hair. Alec lets Magnus tuck his head down against his blanket-covered shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blackwell is one of Valentine's goons from season 1. He's not working for Valentine here, I just needed a convenient mid-level bad guy so he got the job.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We take a brief detour into practical huddling for warmth and dramatic post-danger confessions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Pear for first reading and the final all clear ♥
> 
> I, uh, have realised that I may have slightly altered the geography of the Witcher world for this fic. Go with it. Don't google maps. You'll be happier. :D
> 
> **Content Note**: This chapter has mentions of transactional sex, and the rest of the content warnings up top are still in effect!

"So." Alec looks at Magnus over the barrel they're using as a table. "'The Cat of Vizima'?"

"You heard that." Magnus breaks his silence. He's hardly spoken since the shore. The long light of the afternoon flows in from the open side of the window, lingering on the beaten earth of the mill's floor.

Alec sat Magnus by the hearth and plied him with hot broth and tea until his teeth stopped chattering. Witchers rarely take ill, so they can hope there are no long-term consequences to his plunge in the river. He is looking much less blue, his hands steady again and his damp hair in a tail. He's wearing Alec's town shirt—that is, his newer one—and a pair of baggy trousers that look Ofiri in style.

"I heard most of it. I couldn't get a clean shot, and I couldn't move along the shore without tipping my hand." Alec quells his own contrition. He scarcely owes Magnus an apology, but the instinct is there. _ I'm sorry I didn't act sooner. _ "Did you know we were being followed?"

Now that worry for Magnus is no longer eating up his every thought, the more implicit concerns have space to bubble up. How much danger are they in? How deep in Magnus's troubles has Alec got himself?

Magnus sneezes into his sleeve, then blinks himself into focus. "I knew it was a possibility. What you're really asking is if I knew Blackwell was in the area."

"Look. I've been chased out of a village or two with torches and pitchforks. It's easy for our kind to make enemies." Alec closes his hand on his own raised knee. "But I told you, I can't get bogged down in Velen. We're doing this job together because it takes two people. And—"

Alec's voice deserts him mid-sentence. Those are all true things. This is _ work_, and he let himself forget that for a moment.

"And that's that." Magnus sits cross-legged on a crate, while Alec has the wide windowsill, the closed shutter at his back. Magnus folds his fingers in his lap. He stood by the hearth for a good while, soaking his hands in warm water until the blood lifted from his skin.

Alec has the impression that if he hadn't interfered, Magnus might have waded back into the river, not caring if he froze to death before he was clean.

"I'm sorry." As talkative as Magnus is most of the time, he weighs his words with the care of a Novigrad banker. "There's no proof I can offer you, but I had no idea Blackwell was there. He was a long way from Vizima." Several weeks of hard riding and one wavering imperial border at least.

"We killed him and his men." It's so much simpler to think about these implications. "If he was a captain, those weren't his only men. If they followed us from that Redanian camp, they could only have kept up on horseback, the way we've ridden these past three days."

"I thought the same." Magnus's jaw is tight. "They must've left some of their party behind with their horses. Hounds, too, if we're unlucky."

Unpleasant pressure pricking his temples, Alec slumps into the corner of the sill. "So we should track them down and kill them before they report back."

"If you're proposing murder as a first solution, we truly have our balls to the wall. Though I am touched by the 'we'. Since this is entirely my mess."

Alec chuckles without mirth. It's not wise to dig deeper, and yet he keeps talking. "Blackwell had a bone to pick with you. Does that go for his men, too?"

"I didn't really get the opportunity to weigh their motivations, but it'd depend on the kind of coin they think they can get by taking me to... whoever's paying them." Magnus rises and piles up his bowl, mug and spoon. "I don't think it's personal for them."

"You've got to have more courage than sense to put up a manhunt for a witcher." The way Magnus fought on the shore, caught by surprise, naked and cold—well, Alec wouldn't want to be caught on the wrong end of his blade when he's any degree of _ prepared _ for a skirmish.

"You want to bet on how long these mercenaries have gone without pay? Redania's lost its grip on Velen. Winter's on the way." As if Alec needs the reminder. "That's likely how Blackwell talked his soldiers into this. Come with him to catch this degenerate witcher, a southern cocksucker no one will miss—I can certainly hear the rousing speech he gave."

Alec grits his teeth, as if that would calm the quiver in his jaw. "You think we can still finish this job? Hunt the griffins, go to Oxenfurt? That's the answer I need from you."

"Oh, yes. I suppose I'm rambling." Magnus smiles, but it dies halfway to his eyes. There's no kohl thickening his eyelashes now, and the shadows on his face have deepened. "Is that the _ only _ answer you need from me?"

"It's the most urgent one." Anything past that is tantamount to _ getting involved_. Some part of Alec knows he already failed on that account: he's told stories and listened to Magnus's tales in turn. He allowed himself to enjoy this journey, and now the simple pleasure of company on the road has been warped by the threat baying at Magnus's heels.

That, and the feeling, half twisted, half exultant, that flares in the pit of his stomach when he looks at Magnus for too long.

"It's a couple of hours until twilight." Magnus opens his pack and starts laying out gear: a set of curved throwing knives, light gloves that leave the fingers bare, bracers with blackened steel studs that go over the gloves. "Any reinforcements will know their companions didn't return. They know they're up against at least one witcher. They'll want to wait for cover of night to approach us. So we should be well gone by dusk. Can you find a meeting spot on your map?"

"Are you going somewhere?" Alec crosses his arms.

Magnus drops a heavy leather pouch on top of the barrel. "Mix this with water until you get a spreadable paste. That goes on the horses and you. Confuses every tracking hound ever bred. I assume you know how to hide your actual tracks." His inhalation rattles with a cough. "We can drop the bodies in the river. Their kit should pull them to the bottom."

There is indeed the matter of three corpses ripening in the sun outside. Alec was too busy taking care of Magnus, but he hasn't forgotten.

He sets his chin at a dour jut. He likes this less with every clipped word Magnus speaks.

"Still haven't told me where _ you _fit in this plan."

"You're more of a woodsman than me." Magnus's eyes, slitted with tension, dwell on Alec's face. "Everything I've learned about you says you're not even half the killer I am. Take the horses and go. I'll catch up."

Alec stares. On a harsh pragmatic level, Magnus's assessment is true. It's one thing to hunt beasts, and another to hunt men. The School of the Cat is the only witcher tradition to offer their blades for the latter sort of work. Alec has killed people, but only ever in self-defence.

That makes today a first for him: now he's killed in defence of somebody else.

Magnus tucks the sleeves of Alec's brown linen shirt under his bracers, slips a knife into each bracer, and straightens himself, rolling one shoulder, then the other. Alec can picture his vital, insouciant grace harnessed to the assassin's art easily enough, but the thought disquiets him.

"Is that what you were in Vizima?" He's not sure what compels him to speak. "A killer for hire?"

"Among other things. Can you finish up here?" Magnus pulls his own saddle blanket down from a beam. "I'll handle the bodies."

Before Alec knows it, he steps across the room and seizes Magnus's arm. Magnus jolts, his free hand flying to one concealed blade, and then he stills himself with a gasp. He was an instant from dropping his weight to break Alec's grip, then stabbing him somewhere it hurts.

That's a killer's instinct. Violence as the first response.

Magnus lets his hand fall, the fingers loose, to his side. "It's fine, Alec. Let me go."

Alec can still feel the unease thrumming in Magnus. He's steeled himself against it, but it rings in his bones like a note that won't—or can't—cease.

"Here's what we'll do." Alec relaxes his grip but leaves his hand on Magnus's arm. Magnus can move away if he likes. "We clean up this place. You make enough of your vanishing mixture for all of us. We go uphill until we hit rocky slope and then move over bare ground. By night, as much as we can. No fires. It'll be rough, but we can lose them in the foothills."

"I didn't take you for a peacemonger." Magnus's hushed tone blunts any thorns the word might have. He breathes in a careful rhythm Alec knows well: every initiate goes through meditation lessons for focus and self-control. Even the Cat witchers must see a use for that.

"I'm not." Alec does not miss that Magnus lets him see as he masters himself again. "I just don't think we're out of options. We may have our balls to the wall, but there's some wiggle room left."

Magnus laughs, barely more than a vibration in his throat. "All right, sweet stranger. We'll try it your way."

*

The half-lidded, milky eye of the moon peers over the mountain peaks when Alec finally has to concede exhaustion. The horses, barely rested by their stop at the mill, bury their heads into their oat bags with huffy determination. Alec unbuckles Horse's saddle and mutters apologies into her neck. Her sweat has made Magnus's concoction run like wet clay, into silken streaks down her coat. Alec checks her hooves half by feel, though the moonlight is bright enough to let him survey the straggling edge of the forest below. They rose above the treeline around sundown, trusting the darkness to veil their clandestine climb.

A carpet of pines rambling over the slope provides some concealment. Their mounts are the main problem: Horse is a sure-footed highland breed, and the Chancellor is hardier than his sleek beauty suggests, but they're not meant for pathless rock. In this terrain, Alec and Magnus would make better time on foot.

Still, the horses can live on the oats and millet Magnus bought for a little while, and myriad streams snake through the foothills on their way down to the Velen basin. Even the tinder-dry summer didn't parch them all.

Rubbing his cheek, raspy with stubble he hasn't bothered to shave, Alec finds his fingers caked with the same semi-powdery residue. "Does this stuff wash off?"

"With soap and water." Magnus drops his saddlebags heavily to the ground. "I'd advise against it for now. I have enough for a second batch, but I was saving that for the hunt itself. I don't have the ingredients for more."

"What's _ in _this, anyway?" Alec lays out their evening meal: flat oat cakes baked on the hearth at the mill, and the leftovers of a roasted grouse, bundled into leaves and cloth. "I can picture some types who'd sell their mothers for a potion that let them hide from trackers."

Magnus's breath forms a gusting vapour about his face. "That would be what makes that mixture a trade secret."

"You mean your personal secret, not something you picked up in training." Alec hunches into his cloak. Another lovely side effect of going uphill is that the sting of rime in the night air becomes a real bite. He mantled the horses in their own blankets, and they huddle side by side, dozing with their heads lowered.

"Are you after my alchemical creations now?" Magnus affords Alec a quick, weary smile. A cold supper is a miserable proposition after a rough day's journey, made worse by the fact that they're camping under the open sky. Alec only needs to look at Magnus to know that it's worth it.

Magnus would've chased down the rest of Blackwell's men. He might well have returned without a scratch on him. He would not be smiling.

"I could always ask more awkward questions about your mysterious past, and you could dance around them to keep warm."

Magnus lets out a laugh of very marginal dignity. "I was afraid we'd circle back to that. After today, you're well within your rights. It... is a long story, though, and only happy in a few select parts."

"I don't think people like us get a lot of happy endings."

"Alas that you're right, and on more than one count." Tugging his hood up about his ears, Magnus focuses on his food. Alec lets him. There's a time and a place for debate, and it's not on the trail. It's wasteful to upset yourself or your company when both your strength is needed to succeed or survive.

The stars flicker into lambent life in the cloudless heavens. The rain left the air clear, which only hardens the night frost. They rig the tarp to the pines to serve as a tent. Alec crawls under it while Magnus is still doing the thing he does in the evening: he sits at a spot where he can see the sky, his sword across his knees, as if in prayer or remembrance. He has southern blood, by his own words and by his features, so maybe he has southern rituals, too. Alec hasn't asked. The things he knows about Zerrikania—if that really is where Magnus is from—would hardly fill a thimble.

Sleep is soft as a cat's questing paw on him, a downy weight about to bear him down, when Magnus slides in under the tarp. They slept like this the night before, too, on their own sides of the scant shelter, though the underwood made for a gentler berth than the bare slope.

Alec's no stranger to sharing a bed. The initiates at Kaer Seren would sleep in piles of limbs and furs all winter, driven into this communality by the drafty old fortress and the stingily fed fires. He must have done the same with his siblings; his fractured memories of home speak of humble circumstances.

Through the layered blankets, he jerks as Magnus jabs a knee against his leg. Sleeping back to back isn't the problem. It's the fresh, vivid memory of Magnus in the river, before the mercenaries came. It's the awareness that under the world-weary humour and razor wit, Magnus is beautiful—and touchable. More than that: that he's vulnerable, that he has soft places in his soul the same as Alec.

"I didn't mean to wake you."

"Wasn't asleep," Alec says. "It's fine. We don't have a fire."

Magnus settles, and Alec tenses with creeping expectation. "I suppose when this hunt of ours gets spun into a tale, all the toils of the road will be neatly passed over. Huddling in the brush so as not to freeze stiff isn't quite the stuff of songs."

Despite himself, Alec snorts. Magnus didn't mean to do it, but the levity eases him. "If I hear any version of this trip in a tavern ditty, I'm gonna personally hunt you down and skewer you."

"_Skewer_, is it? I want it known I saw the opening for ribaldry and did not take it."

"Right. That's decent of you."

It's only for a night. Only another body at his back to keep them both warm. Magnus is a wanderer by trade, too. He won't think twice about it.

"Go to sleep. You're half dreaming as it is." Wool chafes as Magnus wraps himself in the blankets. Unbeckoned, his earlier quip comes back to Alec. _ If you're so concerned for your virtue, put your sword between us_. They both have blades within hand's reach, that's only prudent, but Alec trusts Magnus at his back. That's not where the surprise blow will come from.

He doesn't know when he decided that. The thought is firm as the hilt of his sword or the grip of his bow under his fingers, braced for battle.

"I am," he mumbles. "Going to sleep."

The wispy heat of an exhalation brushes Alec's hair, and then there's a gentle, cautious weight on the back of his shoulder. "Good. And thank you."

Magnus's head is rested against Alec's shoulder, his temple on the bare side of Alec's neck, his breath on his skin past the loosened collar of his shirt. Whatever Alec thinks about that, sleep washes irresistibly over him before he can decide.

*

They're up again before dawn, and Alec knows each dwindling day pushes dawn a hair's breadth later. They lead the horses for most of the day, their path becoming serpentine as they wind around wide stripes of blockfield that are impassable to their mounts. It's a relief when clouds blanket the sky, even when they hang as grey and glum as the spirits of their little band. Anything that limits visibility—such as that of their movement across the unavoidable stretches of open ground—counts as a boon.

The second night, Magnus curls into himself with a coughing spell that spooks Alec out of a tarry, muffling dream. It's the kind you get at the edge of your endurance, when the body grips onto any reprieve it can get. He dreamed of a tower, squat and square, with a roof of pinewood shingles. He used to hide in the rafters from somebody. Somebody that couldn't get to the top along the coarse masonry like Alec could, with his young strength and stubborn purpose, rough calluses forming on his toes and fingers from the frequent effort.

On this side of consciousness, there's only Magnus, who whispers in contrite tones for Alec to go back to sleep. He digs up something from his pack and swallows it with evident distaste. His breath wheezes even as he comes back, a pungent herbal smell like crushed juniper needles clinging to him.

_ Cold remedy_, Alec's memory supplies, softened by slumber. _ Mother used to mix it. _Following some response so deeply ingrained it's barely conscious, he turns over onto his back. "C'mon. Get in here."

"Beg pardon?" Magnus says, rather damply.

"Warmer that way." Alec fumbles for a smaller body that should be there, tangled black hair on a head that will only grudgingly consent to being tucked under his arm. He'll win in the end, because the house is chilly with the fire so low. She was always headstrong, even more so than him—

"If you say so," says his current bedfellow. That's unexpected, but Alec is sluggish enough to go with it. He settles in the circle of Alec's outflung arm, his knees to Alec's leg, and draws the last blanket over them both. The slow shared heat lulls Alec back into the dream.

He wakes up alone. The first dull blush of sunrise stains the dew-damp ground.

Outside the tent, Magnus is talking to the Chancellor, not in Common, but in a sibilant, melodious language that might be Ofiri. Alec's fingers meet the thick weave of Magnus's green riding cloak, draped over him on top of the blankets.

*

"I have a question," Magnus says, as the morning drizzles icy droplets down onto their heads. The sole saving grace is that it's only an obnoxious blur of rain, not an outright downpour. "Do you have an end point planned for our daring escape, preferably before we run out of things we can eat without roasting?"

"It's the same end point. If my map is right, we should see the outpost when we get to that hill over there." Alec's timbre rings too brusque. For the first time in his life, he wishes he could disdain last night as a result of too much cheap swill in a slum-side tavern. That always seems to be the excuse. You get too drunk and bed the wrong person.

Except he didn't even do that, and whether Magnus is right or wrong doesn't matter when he should be off limits in the first place. Some of Alec's peers have formed couples as well as hunting pairs—all witchers are infertile, so the women won't face the dangers or blessings of childbirth—but he always thought it a risk to get too close to your fellows. They're meant to be comrades in arms. Sex seems to muddle things. Love? Alec doesn't think he knows much about that.

Magnus, for his part, seems every bit normal. Muddy and exhausted, and still peering behind them in haunted glances, but as fine as you could expect.

All the filth of the road on them both doesn't stop Alec's mind from skipping back to the drowsy moment of Magnus aligning himself to his side. The brief, heavy closeness between sleep and wakefulness. It looms in the background like the landmarks in the misted terrain, in and out of focus.

Once is an accident. Twice is... something more damning.

At least this daring escape is just about the least glamorous effort Alec's ever undertaken. It forces him to just measure and take the next step, and the next, and the next, in a comforting monotony that eventually drowns out all else.

They tie pine boughs to their saddles to erase their tracks. They split up and use the blockfields to lay false trails, then scamper back along the stones that won't betray their passage. They bury their waste and collect as little from the landscape as they can. The horses are as unhappy as their riders, but follow them faithfully even when their steps grow leaden.

"You worry more about them than us," Magnus gripes with mock offence, watching Alec dole out their scarce carrots and wild apples to the horses. Alec wishes he had seeds to add to their grain.

He cuts an apple in half and hands one portion to Magnus. "They're gonna carry us and our spoils to Oxenfurt. Be a short trip if one of them collapses on the way."

With a crunch, Magnus bites into the apple. "Oh, so you're not simply compelled to fuss over everything that moves near you. You'd put the priestesses of the Mother to shame."

Is that what Magnus thinks Alec is doing? Tending to him out of some protective obligation? It beats the truth: that Alec has no idea what to do with the feelings Magnus stirs in him. Magnus has even laid off most of the crude repartee since the incident at the mill.

If Magnus can handle the strains of the journey, Alec can't really do worse.

"I'm just trying to get us all there in one piece," he mutters. "However long it takes."

"I was about to say." Magnus gestures with the apple core. "You should have a look. We may have found your outpost."

Separated from them by one last rugged, forested vale, the outlines of stone parapets rise on the opposite shoulder of the valley. A square tower guards one end of the fort above the fog that lies in fraying patches along the slope. The dregs of a once-proud banner flutter above a humble gatehouse, but the walls look whole, at least from this vantage.

"We must be close to the old Temerian border," Magnus suggests. "That looks like a watchpost. Too small to hold invaders for long."

"Yeah, but you could hole up there practically forever. If the portcullis still works, at least. The only way up is along that path."

"It's almost as if you planned it, no? A suitable bolthole for our troupe of bedraggled souls." Even though Magnus is keeping up, he's hoarse in the mornings and silent when they're on the move. The exertion is crippling his recovery—and a man not endowed with a witcher's stamina might've expired by now.

Gods be kind, but Magnus had better be worth his swords once they get to baiting the griffins. At least he takes _ that _seriously, unlike pretty much the rest of everything. Alec's gone to enough trouble on his behalf to last him a lifetime. And every time the trouble deepens, Alec finds himself wading in yet again.

To escape Magnus and his many contradictions, Alec turns his gaze to the fort.

_ As if you planned it. _The cloud-sieved light makes the roofs of the fort shimmer like tarnished silver, the shingles faded with age. The silhouette of the keep against the cliff imprints itself on Alec's mind like a palm to frost-laced glass, wiping away the mist.

_ As if I knew it. As if I've been here before. _

There must be dozens of outposts like this scattered throughout the Velen wilderness. He passed one earlier in the year, and his tired thoughts have fastened themselves on a half-recalled image.

"Are you coming?" Magnus calls out, his eye on the descent ahead of them. Horse tugs on her reins, ready to follow the Chancellor, and Alec shakes off his reverie.

"Yeah," he says, like a ragged meditation to compose himself to. "Yeah, I am."

*

They reach the weather-bleached gates on top of the cliffside path as the sun kisses the western horizon. It sinks below the clouds to paint them in gold and purple like an imperial panoply. The light wanes fast, though, and they're left to map out their new refuge by Magnus's lantern.

While time and the elements have gnawed on the structures, the original builders knew their craft. Pine saplings sprout through the sand of the training yard. Moss streaks the rainwater barrels and grows lush along the eaves of the keep. Alec finds a bucket to dip into the well in the cellar, and the water he hauls up is sweet and clear. When they open a door behind the dust-covered kitchen to find a tiny bathhouse, Magnus mutters reverent thank-yous to several deities. Verdigris dapples the copper cauldron, but the stove under it still works. Wooden basins are piled in one corner.

After the four dirty, gruelling days they've had, it's damn near the best sight Alec has ever seen.

It is almost midnight before the cauldron is simmering. Alec's arms and back scream for mercy, but they have hot water and a fire in the kitchen. He let the horses graze to their heart's content in the overgrown vegetable patch. The stables are a shambles, so the horses are sheltered in the main hall, where the rusting chains of absent candle lamps still hang above the ruins of trestle tables.

How long has the outpost been empty? When was Temeria conquered? In Alec's lifetime, but he can't piece together the date. Magnus might know.

Magnus squats by the kitchen hearth, the fire glowing ruddy on his bare, sweat-damp arms as he spreads his hands into the heat. He doesn't turn as Alec comes up behind him. Crouched there, he looks like a spirit of the forge, limned in flame, his hair like strokes of coal, loose down his scalp. The sight makes Alec's heart stutter in yet another new way.

"Uh, I bolted the gate," he says. "If anybody tries to get in, we'll have some warning. Though it's dark as a fiend's innards outside. _ I _can barely see anything."

"That's a delightful turn of phrase." Magnus wrinkles his nose. "Very evocative."

"We had this master of arms at Kaer Seren, she had a way with words. You find us someplace to sleep?"

In the next eyeblink, Alec realises the awful implications of that wording, but Magnus appears not to notice. "The kitchen will be warmest, but there's an intact bed upstairs. Officer quarters, at a guess. If you'd rather not look at my face for a night."

"Sure. That works." Alec winces. "Not that—I don't mind your face. I didn't mean it like that."

"In the circles I used to move in, _ that_—" Magnus points a finger at Alec, his eyes a-glint with mischief "—was called 'stabbing yourself with the table knife'."

Alec is glad the fire probably masks his blush. He busies himself with checking the pot where their late supper is stewing. "How's the bath coming?"

"It's not a Skellige sauna, but it'll do."

"I thought you'd never been to Skellige." Alec wheels back through their first conversations. They feel curiously far away.

"I've heard some lavish stories. I once knew the exiled son of a jarl, and..." Stretching his arms wide, Magnus lets himself trail off. "However, why don't you go first? I'll keep an eye out, make sure we're not interrupted this time."

There is a reminder Alec doesn't need right now. He casts about for something else to toss into the teeth of his traitorous mind.

The cloud cover is too dense for the moon to shine, but he recalls Magnus's rigorous evening ritual. "Don't you have... whatever it is you do every night. I don't know if you're praying to somebody, but it looks important."

Magnus halts, his hand curled on the scabbard of his sword. "It's more that I'm praying for someone. Several someones." His voice hitches. "Go take that bath first. I suppose it's time I gave you that story. You've been fairly patient as it is."

"Oh," Alec says, jarred into sobriety by the change in Magnus's bearing. "I figured that'd be one for the victory cups. You know, once we live through this."

"If you want to do this over a drink, I did find a bottle of Temerian rye hidden in the pantry." Magnus's shrug puts a notch in his gravity. "Not that we _ won't _ live through this, but we both know how sharply the Path can bend. It's best to say the things you mean to say while you have the chance."

Alec nods, in agreement and affirmation. It seems the only thing to do.

*

The scavenged whisky is spicy and smooth with age, even to Alec's untried palate. They drink it from their wooden mugs, leaned close to the side of the kitchen hearth that slowly gives forth the heat in its bricks. The bath and the supper have worked quiet wonders on them both. Alec almost forgot what it was like to be clean and full and at least somewhat relaxed.

There's been no sign of pursuit that either he or Magnus could discern. They've taken precautions. They can be at their ease tonight.

It does strike him that he might have cause to be angry with Magnus. This job was never simple to begin with. It's been wound into several knots not only by Blackwell's mercenaries, but by the possibility that _ their _patron has ruinous designs on Magnus.

However skilled and charming Magnus is, he's one witcher. For all the tricks up his sleeves, his gear is worn with use and his glorious horse serves the pragmatic purpose of getting him from place to place. Nobody slogs through the countryside all summer and chases down dangerous monsters if they have other credible options.

Still, the two of them have made it this far without stabbing each other. Going by some stories Alec's heard, wintering at Kaer Seren, that is not a given when witchers partner up for a hunt.

He tosses another log onto the coals of the stove and watches them spit up sparks in a bright corona. The night is at its deepest, the wolven hour when only strange and terrible things are abroad.

Tomorrow, they scout out a killing ground. Catch a deer or goat for bait. Prepare the potions for the hunt and the cures and salves for the aftermath. Alec takes comfort in the thought of those familiar motions.

Magnus tips back the last of his drink and says, "So. Six years ago, a friend of mine smuggled me out of Vizima."

Alec wants to echo that bracing gesture, but only picks up his mug, dangling it from his fingertips. "That's a strong opening. I like it."

"Before that, for a few years, I made a name for myself in the underworld of the capital. I didn't actually title myself 'the Cat', though I'd forgive you for thinking so." Magnus rather resembles his namesake at the moment, slanted against the hearth, the tawny irises of his eyes thin in the gloom. "I suppose it was inevitable. All the second-story work, the near escapes that look miraculous to the common people."

"That doesn't really make you sound more humble about it." Alec can poke Magnus a _ little_, if Magnus plans to tell this like some grand adventure.

"Oh, please. The iron fist of the Vizima city guard is legend. We worked for that fame."

"We?"

"What man of flexible morals and soaring designs could thrive without a crew?" Magnus smiles a narrow smile. "I was the latecomer, as it were. Some of them were leery about letting a witcher join them, but we... had mutual goals. I had a few knacks that could open ways into places too well guarded for them."

"Like a blade to the right throat?"

"That, or a mouth between the right legs." Magnus watches Alec as he says that, and it is a test in kind. Alec may not have much of a gift for subtlety, but he understands that.

"I said I wouldn't judge you," he says, low.

"I know, Alec." Magnus's use of his name carries a weight. "That puts you among a precious few people."

"So you—you went to bed with somebody to help your people." Alec sets down his mug too hard, the whisky splashing his fingers. He dries them on his shirt. "I figure—if there are people in the world you'd do that for, then it's worth it. If some god can't stand the idea that you have to make sacrifices to survive, then I don't know that it should get to tell people what to do."

He presses his eyes shut as if that'd dispel the anger sparking in him. "Sorry. That was... too much."

"I'm a little flattered," Magnus says, "that you think my motives were so noble."

"I think you seem like you always find a way." In his confusion, Alec goes for honesty. "And you care for people more than you want to let on."

Magnus's hands toy with his empty mug, spinning it restlessly by the carved bone handle. "For a time, in Vizima, I did both. We were all outcasts of some kind, brought together by circumstance. Catarina was the only one with a respectable trade, and she was a foreigner. Her clinic was in the slums, struggling to stay open. Raphael's family wanted nothing to do with him, except for his little sister. And Dot, Elias... everyone had a sad story. It didn't much matter what it was."

It continues, the way Magnus holds each name like a handful of gold.

Alec has little to compare that to. He has the seasonal fellowship of the other Griffin witchers, which is good when it happens, but he's always gone on the road on his own. Most of the time, he lulls himself into the thought that he works best alone, with Horse as his only constant companion.

"How does Blackwell come into this? Or the—the Inquisitor? Whichever of them it was."

"I wouldn't even know. Blackwell was a guard captain in Vizima. He must've got into the good graces of the Eternal Fire and the witch-hunters when he came to Redania. When—when I tangled with him before, his highest ambition was to stamp out the gangs in Vizima. We were, as you can see, in the way of that plan."

Direct questions are going over better than Alec expected, so he takes another precarious step. "The way he talked to you, it seemed personal."

A laugh breaks through Magnus's restraint. "I may have seduced his second-in-command so Raphael could slip into his office to steal some very incriminating documents."

"You, a wanted criminal, seducing a high-ranking officer of the guard?"

"Dot was a hedge mage. She had an astonishingly handy disguise charm." Something in Magnus goes still, and Alec feels his own mirth ebb in response. "Of course, when they realised we had a mage among our ranks, Blackwell's thinly veiled fanaticism came pouring out. He started hunting us in earnest."

Magnus touches the back of his left shoulder, like you might touch a statue at a shrine. Alec's heart kind of hurts for him. "They finally caught Elias. He was young. Tender and careless. I never saw his body, but Raphael told me enough. The rest of us fled, but not without losses. And that was the end of our days as the secret kings of Vizima."

Magnus is making a tale out of his own past: snipping the worst details, adding dashes of flair and drama. Alec can't blame him. In fact, his concern rather is the opposite.

"Can I ask?" He waits for Magnus to nod. "Not that I'm not interested, but... you didn't owe this to me. I helped you fight them, sure, but you don't even know me."

"Didn't I?" Magnus sounds both firm and hoarse, like a rasp of winter wind. "I thought you deserved to know what kind of life you saved."

The ache under Alec's ribs winds itself up tighter and smaller, until it's a beating core of knowledge he can't yet put to words. Something has changed. He tastes it in the fire-warmed air.

_ We both know how sharply the Path can bend. _

He reaches for the bottle, and divides the rest of the old Temerian rye evenly between their mugs.

Tomorrow, they hunt.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two professionals hunt griffin and fail at not being heroes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, in particular, took a village. Many and plentiful thanks to Mindy for writing sprints and great enthusiasm, to Jilly for patting my head and telling me all was well, and to Pear for being the loveliest beta and also telling me I'm awful.
> 
> I know I am. A little. ♥ I hope you all enjoy this one!

_ His brother weaves through the thicket ahead of him, the summer morning humid and fragrant around them. A thrill spurs them both on—chores were shirked, fences were climbed, they're free as birds and giddy with their escape. The early sun through the canopy splashes his brother with leaf-shadow, his fair hair flashing white as he moves. _

Alec blinks up at the treetops that the incoming autumn has layered with orange and brown. Nightfall darkens their hues. His hands finish patting the soil back down, over a rough lattice of sticks that covers Magnus's stun bombs.

They camped at the fort for three days without seeing anybody. On the clearest evening, Magnus spotted smoke to the west, beyond the edge of the forest. The outpost commands a good view of the area, which looks to be sparsely settled as best. A road skirts the forest to the west, visible only as a faint curve of grey beyond the blanket of trees.

That same day, Alec found a stag carcass in a glade, picked clean down to the bones. A nearby pine bore scratch marks where something huge had honed its talons on the bark.

The griffins are in the area, and with some luck, they've last hunted at least four nights before.

Alec tries to concentrate on that, to hold fast to the present and the practical. It's as if some foundation of his mind has shifted, and the memories seep in like the damp. Quick impressions triggered by something as minor as a word or a daily task. Dreams that linger even as he wakes up, bright and hazy as the dying fire in the hearth.

Magnus took the bed upstairs, while Alec slept in the kitchen. Busy with the preparations, they've settled at a mostly companionable distance. Alec tells himself he's relieved.

They chose a shallow glen covered in grass and stripes of exposed rock as their ambush spot. The woods are close enough to hide in, but griffins will avoid dense foliage; it hampers their ability to get airborne. It also obstructs Alec's sightlines.

The bombs, filled with samum powder, are laid in a ring around the point reserved for the bait. The impact of a landing griffin will set them off, and the stunning mixture should keep it grounded for long enough for them to cripple its wings.

Griffins are famed for their tenacity, and are too large and hardy to go down fast. With two full-grown opinici, they're looking at a battle of attrition.

In this, Magnus, too, has proven to be a consummate professional. The buried bombs were his idea. It was extra work, but there's a good chance it will pay off.

They moved their camp to the valley this morning. The outpost is too far from their planned hunting ground, and they both know lingering too long in one place is not wise. The Chancellor is tethered back at the camp, but Horse waits, saddled and blinkered, under the trees nearby. Alec's not leaving his most reliable ally out of this fight.

"Did you leave a way for me to squeeze in there?" Magnus grins down at Alec. He has a young, speckled doe draped over his shoulders, its tongue lolling from its mouth, its dainty legs bound with twine. "I should tie this one down. Preferably before the Sign wears off."

"Yeah. Step there." Where Alec would've shot a goat and used the carcass as a lure, Magnus went into the woods and charmed a live deer with a Sign. It will start bleating for its life as soon as it wakes, so the sands are running now.

Once the doe is in place, they retreat into the trees. A late songbird chirps mournfully in the soughing aspen. The waning crescent of the moon has yet to rise, and through the persistent high cloud, it may not give enough light to see by.

"We might wait a while." Alec passes Magnus a filled waterskin and a bundle of food. "Your cloak's in my saddle. The night will get cold."

"True, but I don't think they'll keep us in suspense. The weather's been chancy for these past nights. Griffins hunt by sound and sight. Those work better under a clear sky."

"You think they won't hunt in bad weather?"

"Not until they're hungry enough. Griffins are at least as clever as your average chancery clerk." Magnus tucks the supplies onto his belt. "This won't be like any old fight against an ornery nekker."

"I know that," Alec huffs. "You wouldn't have brought me along if you thought I don't know that."

"Feeling touchy, are we?" Magnus's chortle is so good-natured Alec regrets his remark at once. "I'd be more worried if you weren't a bit nervous."

"Oh, so now you're _ glad _ I'm on edge?" Alec ties the laces at the collar of his light gambeson. It's all the armour he has, other than the pauldron and bracer that go on his bow arm. As an added benefit, it's warm. Magnus is kitted out in steel-studded leather, the metal parts meticulously darkened so they don't reflect light.

Magnus's laugh drops into his throat, a rough burr of amusement. "I can think of a few ways I'd like you on edge, but this is not the moment."

"Maiden, Mother _ and _Crone." Alec tilts his head back. "Did you bring the potions, or were you just gonna banter our prey out of the sky?"

Beside rigorous training, the witcher arts also lean on alchemy. The Trial of the Grasses enables a witcher to ingest magical concoctions that heighten their prowess and level the battlefield against even the most fearsome creatures. It's not without risk—the potions take their own toll on the body—but in this case, they need the advantage.

Magnus lays a line of ceramic vials on a rock. "I thought we'd manage with the basics. In fact, we'll have to, since I didn't have the ingredients or workspace for any fancier brews. So, Cat, Swallow, Thunderbolt, and the beastbane oil for the weapons. That should see us through."

The vials are marked with the symbol for each familiar kind: Cat for seeing in the dark, Swallow for dulling pain, Thunderbolt for speed and stamina. Alec tastes the nettle-prick memory of them on his tongue.

He opens his belt pouch, and Magnus makes a _ tsk _ sound. "Really? You're going to stuff them in there, and then fumble with the clasp while a griffin is spewing acid at your pretty face?"

"Uh, yeah. I make do." Alec does note that Magnus slips his own vials into a narrow boiled-leather case, open at the top, affixed to his belt. The vials are snug in their slots and easy to pull up.

"The salt winds wept," Magnus sighs, in the same long-suffering tone in which Alec invoked the aspects of the goddess. "I have a spare holder. Don't move."

A rummage through his medicine bag unearths another case. Magnus goes on one knee in front of Alec and unhooks the tail of his belt from its securing knot. "Brace your sword."

Magnus means the fact that the shoulder strap holding Alec's blade links to his belt, and might slip when the buckle is opened. For a dragging, delirious second, all Alec can think of is Magnus's face at his hip, his lower lip between his teeth, and Magnus's fingers at his belt buckle, and the one hundred not-so-veiled jokes Magnus has made about his cock.

He grasps the strap at his shoulder so Magnus can loosen his belt and slide the holder into it, on the right, next to the buckles for his quiver. The press of Magnus's hands leaves a seed of fire in his stomach, its warm smoke threading through his veins. He's so acutely aware of Magnus that he jerks his hand away when Magnus brushes against it.

Back on his feet, Magnus holds up the stoppered copper tube he tried to set in Alec's palm. "The oil for your arrows. And your sword, if it comes to that." His face is impregnable to Alec, beyond the slight wry slant of his lips.

"I'd _ like _ it if we could finish this with arrows. Probably won't be as neat as that." Alec inhales, trying to calm the unruly simmer in his body.

"Mmh, we can afford to make this a _ little _messy." Magnus adjusts his glove. "When was the last time you sank a well-oiled blade into something warm and eager for a bout?"

Something in Alec snaps. It might be the last threadbare mooring of his good sense. He levels a crooked look at Magnus. "From a certain angle, that sounds like an offer."

Magnus's mouth drops open, a sudden, dark delight in his eyes like the restless movement of ink blending into water. He makes a tiny huff.

Through the thick sunset shadows, a keening cry slits the air above them.

Snatching up his bow, all else forgotten, Alec dashes to the edge of the trees, Magnus at his heels. The interlacing boughs yield up a slice of sky, and the soaring shape of a great beast, its wings beating a steady pace, trails across the clouds.

"Are we ready?" Wonder and anticipation thin Alec's voice. The griffin is immense, even as a mere faraway silhouette.

"We are," Magnus says, quiet and ironclad. "Well, there's one thing."

"Oh?" Alec sees Magnus step into his space. Then his hand is at Alec's collar, the other in his hair, a greedy, gentle fistful, and his mouth finds Alec's own.

Alec's breath unravels. His fingers fumble for Magnus, to push him away or draw him in, Alec doesn't know, because the kiss pours through him like floodwater. He's never been kissed like this: with firm intent and rough feeling, both of which clash with the caprice in Magnus's eyes as he pulls back.

"If we die," Magnus says, "at least you've been kissed properly once in your life."

Alec could say a thousand things, but they all jam in his throat. His hands fall from Magnus's sides. He more senses than hears Horse getting skittish, with the sounds of an unseen predator in the air and Alec nowhere close.

"Stick to the plan," is the last thing he'll ever say to Magnus, if they happen to perish here. "We get one chance at this."

Magnus slips away into the shadows, and they fold over him even as Alec turns to his own position.

*

Creeping fingers of ribleaf bush extend from the forest and onto the glen. Smudged with Magnus's scent-stealing concoction, his vision heightened into stark, colourless detail by the potion he just downed, Alec sidles into his perch among the ribleaf.

About twenty paces from him, the doe scrambles and snorts, the torpor of the Sign gone. The twine bonds hobble the deer, though, and Alec rolls over for a look of the sky. The sinking sun leaves enough light that the griffin becomes a dark, circling dot against the pallid background.

"Swift-soled Maiden, friend of the hunter, guide my hand." Alec's piety has been lacking for most of his life, but now, he rubs chill soil into his palms and hopes the goddess has passed there on silent feet, her ashwood bow in hand.

The potion whets his senses to an edge, a fluid alertness that purges all else from his consciousness. He watches the solitary griffin. The pair seems to also hunt together, but he and Magnus will have their hands full even if the other beast doesn't appear.

It was always something of a desperate gambit. Alec has five arrows dipped in the beastbane oil, and a trickle left for his sword—and oh, fuck, he can never oil a weapon again without his ears burning.

The doe grunts in distress, and the griffin curves out of its wide loop.

It dives out of the sky with a frightful, scraping noise, like a roar drawn out impossibly long. 

Alec grabs an arrow, nocks it, and comes out of the ribleaf to aim just as the griffin alights. Wood creaks, crockery shatters—they used old jars from the kitchen for shells—and the samum powder bursts up in glittering gouts.

The griffin rears, tall as a barn, the deer's neck crushed by one massive hind paw. Its pinions rise like boughs to frame its deep chest and eagle-like head. Alec finds himself gasping at the sight, even with the potion bleeding away all colour.

The griffin's whole upper body hitches, a knifing backward jerk, and it spits a hissing stream of liquid at the ground. A defensive reflex, with the bomb overwhelming the beast.

_ Acid. _Magnus had it right. It really is an opinicus. While its outer plumage is tough as boiled leather, the joint of its wing and body is more vulnerable, and it hasn't realised Alec's presence yet.

He aligns his shot, letting his breath in and out and in, and fires.

The arrow lodges into the wing near the base, before the griffin thumps the claws at the second joint of its wings into the grass. The claws turn the wing into a kind of foreleg while the griffin is on the ground. The talons are a formidable weapon even on a common griffin; on the opinicus, they're the size of Skellige dirks, tapering to needle-like tips.

Alec scampers for a second arrow, which glances off the griffin's head. With luck, he scraped an eye, but now it knows where he is. He has moments before the stun powder clears from the air.

"Magnus!" he yells, even as the third shaft thrums from the string. The wing, again; the feathers disappear between the bristling plumes. The monster grinds and sloughs its way out of the shallow trench where the bombs were, then rushes at him.

A beast that big takes a moment to gather speed. Since Alec has the fourth arrow at hand, and each drop of the beastbane oil he can get under the griffin's skin helps, he stills himself and holds his aim.

Horse whines in warning behind him. He smells the rank carnivore stench of the griffin as it opens its beak, barely ten strides away, and there, Alec has the right angle.

The arrow takes the beast in the side of the throat, missing the windpipe. It recoils, the acid it was about to spew splattering in heavy but harmless droplets.

Fire tears a whiplash line through Alec's vision: Magnus, his palm extended, aims a focused spout of flame at the griffin's right wing. Alec feels his teeth grit at the _ idea _of the effort that's costing him, but the Sign burns hot enough to eat into the scale-like protective plumage.

The griffin shrieks and wheels in a fan of flame, and Magnus scrambles back from its goring foreclaws. That buys Alec time to draw his sword. If they can flank the beast, one of them should be able to get in a swift killing blow.

Dragging its scorched wing, the griffin snaps at Magnus again. Magnus dances to the side, his sword in a two-handed grip now. The blade whistles as he lays into the beast's injured side in hard, powerful blows that seek the humerus bone. Crack that, and the griffin will be earthbound.

Alec chances tugging a vial free and swallowing the potion. He kind of hates this one: while the Cat potion brings sensory clarity, Thunderbolt is also like its namesake, a crackle of energy that surges into the lungs and the heart, instilling a near need to move and act and expend it to some end.

Still, it's the Cat that saves him in the next moment.

Over the flurry and noise of Magnus facing the griffin comes a rush of air as the second beast swoops low over Alec. In the nick of time, he flings himself into the grass, and the monster passes so close that a kick of its hind leg would split his gambeson like a fingernail does orange peel.

It lands, spraying dirt and vegetation, and continues its plunge at Magnus. Coughing his way up through the flying dust and grass, Alec loses sight of him. The thunderous impact of a repelling Sign sounds off his next move, though. The second griffin—the female, since its head lacks the crest of plumes that characterises most males of the species—is too large to be knocked back, but it comes to a stuttering halt. The male rakes across the glen, away from Magnus. Alec has to get in there; if they pincer Magnus in between them—

Then he hears the _ whump _ of wings unfurling wide. Magnus slings a wave of searing embers at the female, then follows up with a lightning-fast stroke at its shoulder. His blade rings on bone, but comes away wet with blood.

"Alec!" Magnus shouts, even as he surges at the thrashing griffin again. "The other one!"

The instruction is not the clearest, but Alec sees the problem. The male curls in on itself, ready to spring into the air. Alec's first arrow sticks out from the lowest joint of its wing, but the joint still moves.

He swerves on his heel to grab his bow from where he dropped it in the ribleaf. "Horse!"

True to that old summons, she trots into view. He hoists himself into the saddle, shoves his sword into the saddle clamp without its scabbard, and prods her to turn. Her ears are flat and wary, but they've done this before.

"Come on, girl," he murmurs. "Let's bring it down."

There was one more reason Alec wanted to use the glen: it slopes down even enough for riding. Horse responds to the nudge of his knees, even as the griffin launches itself into teetering flight. To the side, Magnus is going at the female with Sign and sword, but Alec has to leave him to handle that. If he lets the male ascend beyond bow range, it's as good as lost. It can drag itself to a mountain nest to heal or die.

He clicks his tongue at Horse: _ gallop_, in their shared language of signs. She knows the rein and the spur from anybody, but this is only between them.

She speeds ahead, her head low, her hooves muffled by the sandy earth, as Alec frees an arrow. The bow feels light in his hand, silk-smooth on the draw, but he doesn't have endless time before the potion runs its course. Blood pours in gushes from the griffin's wing.

His shot pierces its belly, instead of the wing, and it screams fit to rattle the evening sky. Wobbling, it twists to the left. Alec and Horse echo the curve, back towards the ambush site as the griffin strives for the shelter of the woods.

"One more," he whispers to himself. Horse veers around a thorn bush, her breaths a churning bellows under him. Fire flares ahead, and metal clashes against bone. The female is pecking at Magnus, rapid, grisly stabs of its beak that can crush the spine of a mature stag with a single bite.

Alec misses his next shot. He swallows his frustration like a bitter draught. The light is failing, the sun's final fiery stripe dwindling from the horizon. He'll lose the griffin into the darkening clouds. He lets Horse whisk past Magnus and keeps his eyes fast to the sky. By feel, he finds his long-flight arrow, the one with the slender head of elven steel, the one that flies the farthest.

Griffins can't glide. As long as the male wants to stay alight, it needs to beat its tattered wing. It makes a looping turn, calling out to its mate.

Alec steers Horse into an opposite arc, so they come at the griffin from its front. There is a thud from behind them, a body smacking into brush that rustles in protest. Steels clangs and skitters, and the female tears forward with a cry.

His mouth set, Alec leans to the side in the saddle, trusting the strength of the bow to carry the shot to its target. _ Don't look at Magnus. Don't look at anything. There's only you and the target. _

"Oh no, no you don't," Magnus shouts, and at least that means he's alive. Horse careers over rock, the sound of her hooves changing. Alec glimpses the pale feathers of the male griffin's throat, a diamond shape in its shadowy form.

He knows he has the potion to thank for the shot. For that moment, his muscles don't feel the strain. For that moment, his breathing is clear and calm.

The arrow sings from the bow and sinks deep into the griffin's neck. Alec sees the shock pass through its body: a mighty, violent spasm, and then it tumbles.

Before it strikes the ground, the other griffin crashes into Alec from his blind side. Its weight shoves him from the saddle, and Horse bolts with a wailing neigh. He meets the ground side-on, scree under him and the enraged griffin above. It comes down hard into the rubble, its whipping leonine tail nearly braining him as he scrambles back, pain bursting in his ribs. His sword is on his saddle. Horse ran, like he's taught her to if he gets thrown off.

"Alec!" Magnus's voice carries over the ruckus, but he sounds too far away. The monster spins, and Alec is still supine, his palms scratched from the stones.

That is when the last of the potion wears off. This is the part he hates. You learn to suck it up, to brace for the drop, but now the brunt of it hits like a physical blow to his already rattled body. His breaths become frantic gasps. His vision lurches.

He has no sword. His hunting knife will barely put a dent in the monster working up a gob of acid to belch at him, but—a Sign. Alec knows all of them and only a hollow ringing fills his mind where that knowledge should be.

The griffin's curved neck flashes in his sight. Its beak gapes. Its copper-yellow chest is charred and streaked with red, marks of Magnus's magic and blade. The staccato hacking of the griffin hammers in his skull.

It spits, and in the same instant, Magnus cleaves its head half off.

A sword is not an axe: even Magnus's furious driving leap can't sever the beast's sturdy neck in one swing.

"Get back, _ get back!_" Magnus, ragged and wild, brings his blade around for another strike. Whether he means Alec or the griffin, Alec stumbles back to his feet. The griffin teeters grotesquely, its blood and acid thick in the air, and lashes out with its foreclaws.

Magnus screams. His sword lands true, finally splitting the vertebrae, but as the beast falls, he collapses with it. His right leg buckles, and blood pumps from the three parallel gouges the griffin rent into his thigh.

Alec's heart seems to stop in his chest, thrumming captive between beats. From the way it gushes, that's arterial blood. If the talons went into bone, Magnus might never—he can't—

Well, Alec is _ damned _if he lets Magnus die in a pool of his own blood on this questionable field of victory.

He raises his spent voice to call to Horse. She'll find her own way back to him, but he has no time to wait. Tearing through his supplies, he finds the bandages, the vial of Swallow, a clump of bloodmoss. Magnus breathes in rapid gasps, too tight in the grip of the pain to even cry out.

"Magnus." Going to his knees, careless of the blood spatter, Alec takes his hand. "Magnus, listen to me."

Fingers clamp down on Alec's own. "Oh, oh, fuck. Alec—are they—"

"I need you to swallow. Don't make the obvious pun, or the horrible one either." Alec pries the cork from the vial and trickles the potion into Magnus's mouth. Swallow cures nothing, but it helps prevent shock and mollifies pain. He needs Magnus lucid.

Magnus makes no puns. His throat works in small twitches until the potion is down. "How bad is it?"

Magnus's grip is still strong. Alec guides his hand to the inside of his own thigh, where the large blood vessels run. "Press here. Hard as you can. We need to stop the bleeding or you won't last till moonrise. You understand?"

Alec takes the jerk of Magnus's head as a yes, adjusts his fingers until they're at the right spot to press at the artery, and unspools the hemp bandage to make a proper torque. Magnus shudders, but does exactly as told. This can't be the first time he's been torn up on a hunt or otherwise.

The litany of things that can go wrong with a wound like this is awful and unending. Wound fever, blood loss, inflammation, permanent damage even the witcher mutations can't contend with. They were _ prepared _for injuries, as much as you can ever be.

Horse makes an unhappy noise, ruffled by the stink of griffin, but halts close by. The griffins are down. They did it: they hunted not one, but two opinici. The profits could last Alec a year or more.

Nothing could be farther from his thoughts. His exhalations turn to visible vapour. He should be glad for the night's chill—it'll help keep the carcasses from spoiling—but it's a mile to their camp, and Magnus can't walk. Alec shouldn't even move him. Alec can do splints and sutures, but the cuts go to the bone or at least very near. Magnus needs somewhere warm and clean, with a real pellar or herbalist to tend to the complications that are almost certainly coming.

That is, if he doesn't bleed to death first.

"I'm gonna lift your leg." Alec slots his hand under Magnus's thigh, so he can slide the torque under it and tie it off. "This might hurt."

Of all things, Magnus laughs, bruised and breathy. "Why, sweet thing, if you wanted to get between my knees, all you had to do was ask."

"Don't fucking flirt with me," Alec hisses, even though a terrible, contrary laugh tries to escape him. He wants to be angry at Magnus. _ You didn't have to get right in its face—a thing this huge never dies clean—why did you even do that— _

"If—if one is to exit the stage, one might as well do it with flair."

"You're not _ dying_." It sounds more watery than Alec meant. He secures the torque, then tucks bloodmoss into the gashes to form an absorbent layer. It'll help the blood clot faster.

"Alec." Magnus taps Alec's dirty cheek with unsteady fingers. "We're—we're in the middle of nowhere. It's cold as a witch's tit, or will be. There's more wealth lying in this glen than you've ever seen in your life. Go to my friend Catarina—she teaches at the Oxenfurt Aca—Academy. Bring her my swords, she'll know. You—"

"Shut up," Alec bites out. Tears drip down the bridge of his nose, rolling onto his cheeks as he looks up. "Horse. Down."

Her tack jingling, she folds her legs under her and lowers herself to the gory ground. Sometimes he marvels at her utter trust in him, but right now his hurry eclipses that gratitude. They're companions. They have a pact.

Somehow, in the course of two measly weeks, Alec has extended that pact to Magnus. He didn't ask or offer. He decided.

"Alec," Magnus says again, halting. Alec unrolls Magnus's cloak from where it was stowed on Horse's saddle. Magnus groans as Alec lifts him, tempering his gestures in spite of the haste thrumming in him.

"Don't faint," he says, his arm around Magnus's back. Magnus grabs his empty sword strap, then the pommel of the saddle. His leg hangs limp, and slow blooms of scarlet are seeping through the dressing, but he allows Alec to help him. At Alec's sign, Horse clambers up again.

"What are you doing?" Magnus gives him a shadowed look. His eyes are hazy, and he pushes through the gloss of pain with a willful effort.

"And, first and last of all, stop telling me to leave you." Abrupt fury shakes Alec. He sticks his foot in a stirrup and climbs up behind Magnus. "I'm saving your sorry life if it's the last thing I do."

"Again." The word tapers off into a sigh. Magnus slumps into the curve of Alec's body. Alec works the hood of the cloak up over his head, then wraps his left arm around him.

"You jumped in front of a godsdamned griffin for me." Alec blows a shivery breath against the top of Magnus's head. "Can't fall behind, can I?"

Narrow as a coffin nail, the moon rises in the east. There was smoke to the west, so that's where Alec turns, giving Horse her head.

*

He rides. The night is pitch-black around him, under the old moon and the scuttling clouds. He finds first a game path, then a woodcutters' track, then a road, little more than two cartwheel ruts puddling with rimy water. The Chancellor huffs at the end of his tether, his pale flanks slathered with mud. Alec's boots and Horse's coat are damp with the same muck.

He rides because he doesn't know what else to do.

Somewhere along this road is a farmstead, or a village. Somebody who knows what Magnus needs. Something better than a camp in the autumn forest and Alec's rudimentary skills at medicine.

His head still rings at every sharp movement and sudden jounce as Horse tries to keep her footing and her pace in the dark. He listens to Magnus's breaths with fevered attention.

It does come to him, in the cold and the quiet, that this is most likely how he'll die one day. Done in by one monster or another, too far from any settlement where people might still as soon kill him as help him.

The face of the forest changes: the trees widen and sprawl, and the land mellows. The wind carries the smell and sound of running water to him with dreamlike clarity. Wilting vines of honeysuckle drape a dilapidated stone wall that guards a fallow field.

As Horse canters ahead, Alec swims headfirst into a memory.

_ Summer, again, runnels of sweat down his back as he hurries down the muddy path after his mother. Her skirts are blue as the smoke from the valley, and the sheaves of herbs and flowers hung from her belt swish with the linen. _

_ He reaches her, hands full of fool's parsley, the scent of the plant so strong his eyes sting. She bends down to receive the bundle, her fingers warm in his hair. _

Magnus mutters something. The sound pulls Alec up from a great, smothering depth.

After all this, he's losing his head. He has no idea where they are or where to find help. He just rides, through the phantoms of the past that cluster ever closer. He's lost his cloak somewhere—back at the camp, where he left most of everything not already secured to a saddle.

When a light winks through the trees, his first thought is that it's the Crone's silver lantern, the frost-white candle at the end of her staff that shines for the dying. All of him is heavy: his own body, Magnus slumped into him, the gait of his valiant horse that will run for him until she, too, crumples. The night is in his bones, in the hard tattoo of his heart.

The light doesn't move. It's the colour of real, yellow flame.

A path forks from the road to the right, into the woods. It bears the recent tracks of a cart and horse, and a few blurred footprints along the sides, coming and going.

Alec tugs the horses onto the path. Meadow on both sides, a smattering of apple trees. Broad, age-old oaks hem a timber farmhouse with a sod roof thick with grass. The outbuildings are lost in the dark, but a candle burns in a lantern hung on a gate post, a tiny beacon to guide the traveller.

A dab of cold slides down his cheek. Snow, he understands. Brittle flakes float down like a shroud.

The house looks old, by the moss in the eaves and the striated, cracked wood of the walls. A home well tended, simple and solitary. Something rustles in the woodshed leaned against the left-hand wall of the house.

The time must be between the first and second sleep, Alec thinks, distant, as if there were a veil between him and reality. People will stir from their beds for a bit, stretch their legs, stoke fires, fill the night's silence.

He drops from Horse's back and winds her reins and the Chancellor's tether around a fence post. Magnus stirs, swaying sideways, and Alec hurries to set his hands on the saddle frame.

"Stay here." He squeezes Magnus's clammy fingers. "I'll be back."

Magnus looks down at him dimly. His eyes are open, but it's like he sees something else. The Crone mutters among the gnarring branches, beckoning the souls of those on the brink of the beyond.

Alec draws his hunting knife. It's not truly a weapon, but it's sharp enough to slice hairs in half. The hilt grasped in his fingers, he closes Magnus's hand between his own, kisses his cold knuckles. "I'll be back."

If he has to kill every person in that house for the sake of this man, he will.

*

There is a woman in the woodshed. She's bundled in a woollen shawl, under which hangs the hem of a long-sleeved chemise, loose over her skirts. She hefts a full firewood basket to her hip and makes her way back, following the familiar side of the house. Her boots clunk as if they're too large for her, a man's shoes.

As she turns the corner, Alec grabs her by the forearm, twists her arm up behind her so the basket tumbles to the ground, and presses the flat of his blade to her neck. Her shout reverberates from the yard trees.

"Quiet," he hisses, "or I'll cut your throat."

She tries to stomp on his foot. He has a head of height and a likely two decades of combat training on her, so that's a short-lived attempt. "What the fuck—"

He has to swallow before the words come out audible. "Is there a healer close by?" 

He's hurting her, he knows, his grip immobilises her arm, but she wrenches at it anyway. "Are you some idiot sent from the village again? Let me _go!_"

"I asked you a question."

"I swear, if you don't get your hands off me right now, I'll—"

"You," Alec grinds out, letting the knife bite into the underside of her jaw, "will tell me what I need to know."

He expected her to scream. Maybe panic. Other than her first surprised yelp, she's done neither.

"I'll bite your balls off first. Leave us alone! Like you don't know who lives here!" She's young. Younger than him, thin as a willow wand. Her blood oozes onto his fingers. He could simply slit her throat and take whatever supplies are to be found in the house. There'd be a fire. It might be enough.

He hears the distinctive, liminal creak of a bow being drawn.

Somebody stands in the yard to his right, maybe ten steps from him, with an arrow aimed at his head. Their cloak hides the shape of their body, but the height suggests another woman.

"I see your eyes shining, so I'm guessing you can see me." Her voice is low, with a warm undertone now hardened to iron. "Let her go, witcher. I can put an arrow in your skull before you can kill her."

She had to move quietly as a shadow to get that close. That, or Alec's senses are overfull, spun about by his own anxiety and exhaustion. And she knows what he is. She told that at a glance in the snow-stippled dark.

He can probably duck out of her aiming line quick enough. Use her friend as a shield. She doesn't sound like she's bluffing.

Every moment he wastes here is a moment Magnus can't afford to wait.

"I—I have somebody in need of help." He lays the knife against the first woman's shoulder. "I need a healer. A pellar, a midwife, something."

"You thought the best way to ask for that was with a blade?" The archer holds her aim. She's shot a fair bit, then, to be able to maintain her draw like that.

Alec has a vertiginous sense of falling and settling, like her question were anchoring him back to some shore of self, a boundary he should remember. He was about to kill a person who's done nothing to him.

"Please." His mind shimmers. That's what it feels like, a rapid tremor at its edges. The woman in his hold has gone still.

"Who is this person, and who are you?" The archer shifts minutely, and her cowl falls from her head. She's not much older than her companion. Her dark, wavy hair is bundled up so it frames the oval of her face. "I can help, but you need to tell me. There's been trouble." She hums, dry, as if that were of little consequence. "Would also help if you let my friend go."

It's sheer stupidity to release his best bargaining chip. She will tire of keeping the bow up before long.

She might also just shoot him. More than that—besides that—the sound of her voice, the pleasant, steady cadence of it, strikes sparks against a stone wedged deep in his memory.

"We've had witchers pass this way before. I know how the villagers look at you." A note of persuasion enters her timbre.

Alec lets his grip go loose. His captive darts away from him, tilting to the left until she's behind the archer. "He's my... my partner. We were on a hunt, and he got hurt. A griffin tore up his leg."

"You're not thinking of _ helping _ him?" The younger woman picks up a log, as if she's planning to wallop him with it. "He nearly killed me!"

"Look at him," the archer says, none too subtly. "You poke him with that log, he'll fall over."

Would he? Alec doesn't know. He was so full of humming, overwhelming purpose. Magnus. He has to get back to Magnus. Magnus would seek out a way to deal with these two without violence.

He allows his knife to drop. Snow brushes his face, melting there. "My name is Alec." That's a witcher's introduction; most people add the name of their family or clan or city. "Uh. I'm from Kaer Seren in the north, in the Dragon Mountains, if you know where that is."

"Maiden of Mercy." The dark-haired woman narrows her eyes, her mouth parting in bafflement. All her studied poise seems to quiver. "Clary. The lantern, please. Go."

Something in the way she says that sends her friend dashing away, though not without a backward look at Alec.

"Oh, gods, this is—" She hesitates. Her gloved hand clenches on the bow. "How old are you?"

What does _ that _have to do with absolutely anything? "Listen. I don't have time. Whatever you're gonna do, just do it. Just tell me where to go. I can't let him die."

The bow falls from her hands, and she steps across the strewn logs to stand in front of him. He can see her better now, her wide, searching eyes and the sharp curiosity in them, her cold-bitten mouth, her smooth cheeks.

"I will help your friend. I promise. Answer my question."

"Twenty-five winters," he says, or rather croaks.

A face through clouded glass, watching as he was taken. Did she run after the witcher as he rode away? Did she watch for him at the gate, as she would when he was out helping Mother, waiting for him to come home?

Snow flutters down through the space between them.

"Alec." She tastes the name, careful, careful. "I'm Isabelle. I... I think you're my brother."

She tries to control her expression, but tears gather on her lashes. Her mouth is a taut line between hope and fear.

Alec folds unceremoniously to his knees, sapped by the shock. He spent the summer riding along roads and hills that teased him with their swoops and turns, a map to long-buried memories. These are the woods of his childhood. This is where his mother gathered her plants. This is it: the house, the oaks, the lantern at the gate that would always be lit when somebody was out late.

Isabelle comes to him, her hands clumsy on his shoulders. He looks up at her with a sort of speechless awe. "I'm right, aren't I? I was seven, when—when you went, but I remember." She smells of the woods, of loam and wool and early frost.

"Izzy," he says, hoarse. The nickname comes to him like a key to unravel a cipher. "That's—that's you, right?"

"That's me." Her smile is shaky, heartbreaking in its fragile happiness. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

Alec can't go to pieces. Magnus is counting on him, he has work to do, and yet for a moment, the only thing he knows is this: his lost sister smiles down at him, holding his face with fingers that no longer tremble.

Without rising, he scoops her close and buries his face in her cloak. Her arms wrap around him and they cling together, wordless with vast, uncertain relief.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can't go home again, but you may find it anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill: Pear is the best and caught all my typos and weird repetitions.

Alec snaps out of his fretful, drained haze as Isabelle steps into the twilit main room of the house. An apron covers her kirtle, the strings dangling at one hip. Her bun has degraded into a nest of wisping strands.

"He's asleep." Satisfaction slips into the sober voice she's used ever since she helped Alec carry Magnus inside. "And running a fever. I gave him as much white myrtle as I dared. It'll ease the pain so he can sleep. The leg's the worst, but he has plenty of cuts and bruises, too."

Two bedchambers branch off from the main room. A third doorway leads into the workroom where Isabelle keeps her apothecary. Magnus is settled in a cot in the smaller bedchamber, and Alec can't help but peer past Isabelle at the closed door curtain. He's been sitting at the table for a while, after his sister frog-marched him away from Magnus's bedside.

His sister, who is apparently an herbalist of no mean skill. She followed in the footsteps of their mother. On the kitchen side, the beams are filled with plants in tidy sheaves next to the hanging pots and ladles. Alec feels like he's walking through a dream.

"Thank you," he says. "I don't even know what else to say."

"That's a start." She dries her hands on a clean patch of her apron. Rust-red splotches mar the cloth. "Did you get something to eat?"

"Your grouchy friend told me to help myself—" Alec waves a hand towards the kitchen, barely lit by the embers in the open hearth "—but I, uh. I've just sat here and worried."

"You did try to cut her throat a little." Isabelle—Izzy—folds herself onto the bench next to him. He still isn't sure if Clary is a servant, lodger or indeed a friend, but she slunk away into the other bedchamber with the ease of a frequent visitor. Given the cold night, she and Izzy were probably sharing the curtained bed there. The bed Alec and Izzy's parents must have slept in.

He can't go there now. The present is precarious enough.

"I know." He wrests his mind into focus. "I'm sorry about that. I was trying to scare her."

Her eyes weigh him, and he doesn't know if he's found wanting. In spite of her complaints, Clary brought him a washbasin and a hempen shirt, so he could get the dirt and blood off. The shirt belongs to somebody shorter than him, but it's clean. His and Magnus's things are heaped in the entryway, his bow and the two pairs of swords topping the mess.

Their mercenary gear looks rough and out of place in the house, with its sanded floorboards and warm rugs, two chairs decorated with painted flowers set next to the open entrance to the kitchen. The whole room wraps around a brick-and-mortar fireplace, which has an oven and a cooking hearth on the kitchen side, with pot hooks of wrought iron. Everything speaks more of good care than wealth, but to Alec, it exudes a comfort both startling and familiar.

Finally Izzy says, "We don't scare easy."

"I noticed." With his sleeves rolled up, the scars on his arms and the fresh scratches on his hands seem too prominent, a ruinous record of who he is, what he's become since he last was here. "You said there was trouble. What kind?"

"_That _is the first thing you ask? You can barely stand up. You haven't eaten, and it must be morning soon. I don't even know how you found your way here."

"I didn't exactly plan to." _ I don't want to bring more trouble for you. _"Izzy. I have no idea where to start. I'm..."

Since that first clinging hug in the yard, Izzy's been in motion. Alec has lent a hand as best he can. All that aside, a flood-wave of things follows from their reunion, and it's licking at their feet.

"You're safe," she says, with the same surety that governed her when she was tending to Magnus. "You can sleep on a bench here or in the loft. I want you to have a cup of tea and some food, and all of this will be here tomorrow. Your friend included."

"That sounds like your surgeon voice." He finds a smile in himself.

Her mouth curls in answer, a twinkle of delight. "It's my 'don't mess with me when I have the cure for your troubles' voice, but that's pithier."

She leads him into the kitchen and gets out cheese and bread, sausage links and hard white apples. He ladles water from the cauldron on the fire into a soot-blackened copper teapot. At a guess, her tea blend has dreamroot in it; he smells the syrupy fragrance. It's a gentle soporific, for when you want to make sure somebody sleeps.

"Can I check on him?" The tea will take a moment to brew, and so, Alec finds himself again pulled towards the chamber in the corner.

Izzy's brows cinch in something like sympathy. "Take your time. Just be quiet."

He doesn't know what she sees in his face, but he ducks his head and goes.

Magnus lies with his cheek tipped into the pillow, his hair loose, a stormy bruise on his temple. Alec has a few matching ones from his tumble from horseback. The sheets are drawn up to his shoulders, and Alec is loath to disturb his weary calm, induced by Izzy's herbs or not.

In the middle of his world upending itself, he's glad Magnus is alive. It's a strange, laden happiness, an ache as much as a relief.

"I don't know if you can hear me," he whispers, "but we made it." He folds his arms on the edge of the bed. "No points for style, maybe, but we can embellish a bit when we find some poor minstrel to make a song out of this."

Pragmatism tells him not to breathe easy yet. Griffin claws carry a greater danger of inflammation than swords or arrows, and more men die in sickbeds from their injuries than on the battlefield.

Alec can't go with his usual stoicism today. This is Magnus: crooked, clever and irrepressible, always with a piercing insight or at least a rude joke to lighten Alec's mood. He cants his head to the pillow, facing Magnus, the buckwheat hulls in the pillow crinkling under his ear.

"I found something incredible. I kind of need you to wake up and tell me this isn't some whisky-fuelled dream I'm having at the fort. I mean, you could spin this up. I couldn't, so maybe it is real."

Magnus coughs, but Izzy's draught keeps him fast asleep. Alec touches his fingers tenderly to Magnus's brow, above the bruise, then makes himself rise. Magnus needs rest. The best thing Alec can do is make sure he gets that.

Izzy stirs a spoonful of honey into his tea. He wouldn't have asked for it, but he accepts the drink, the bone cup warming his hands.

They sit facing each other at the table, its surface pitted and glossed by years if not generations of use. One of them grew to adulthood around this table; the other was split away. Alec eats, because it seems to put Izzy at ease, and also because he's starving.

He clears his throat. "I have to ask. Is it just you and her? Here at the house?"

"Yes." She gets to her feet. He watches her pour water and grain into a crock to soak for morning porridge. A trivial task to busy the hands. "Mother died two years ago. Father's been gone... a long time now. Jace is in Oxenfurt, working as a guard. He won't tell me, but I think he's seeing a girl. He visits, but it's a long ride. I keep the house and the fields. Clary is a big help."

Alec lets it all spout: it's almost two decades of life that went on after he was gone, winter after summer, death and change and growth. It's so much, but how could she tell it any other way except in bare words?

And they have a brother. He lives. Alec swallows against a swell of bemused relief. His life has cracked wide open, glutted him with feeling, filled him with things he'd taught himself not to miss.

"Jace," he repeats. "Loud, fair hair, always in trouble?"

Izzy laughs, a peal of bubbling mirth. "That's Jace in six words. Maybe add reckless, big-hearted, annoyingly charming. At least he thinks that last part is true. He... He's fine. I saw him this summer, and he does write. Letters just haven't been too reliable as of late."

"The war?"

"The war." She leans her hip on the table. "That must be what brought you this way, too, right?"

"Yeah. To Velen, that is. Just to see someplace new." His expression twitches. "Izzy. I never wanted to, but I—I lost you. It sounds awful when I put it like that, but Kaer Seren is a month's hard riding from here—and that's now, when I have a good horse and I know the way."

"I'm not angry with you, Alec," she says, soft. "I used to be. I was seven and I was furious at everyone. You, for leaving me alone. That witcher, for taking you away. Most of all, Mother and Father, for letting you go."

"You—" He doesn't know why his mind clings to this detail like a burr to wool. "You didn't even know his name? Or where he took me?"

"I remember he wore that." She points at the griffin's-head medallion at his neck. He's so used to its weight he didn't even think to take it off for washing. "Not that it did me any good. Witcher hideouts are, well, hidden. I learned that quickly."

He quells the ache that blooms at the thought that she tried, at age seven, to find out where he was. It slots right into his fragmented mental image of her.

"I'm sorry." He finds his voice gone to tatters. "I'm sorry, Iz, I—"

She shakes her head, a small, forceful _ no_. "Don't. Neither of us had the power to change what happened."

Still, when he stands up and reaches out, she steps into his arms and holds on with a twinge of anguish in her grip. Like this, the top of her head is at the level of his shoulder. She has such a presence to her that it feels momentarily odd how small she is, though compact and solid with hard work.

"You know," he mumbles, soothed by her warmth and nearness, "I could sleep now. We both should."

Izzy nods against his shoulder.

*

Alec sleeps through the morning under the sheepskins and quilts Izzy brought out for him. The bench is the closest thing to a real bed he's seen in over a month, but it is both comfort and exhaustion that make him roll over and doze off again even as Izzy and Clary rise.

Clary is gone by the time he gets blearily to his feet. The nocturnal snow has melted, leaving the ground muddy and the air pristine. Izzy sets out a meal and Alec lets her fuss over him. He's not sure how to receive her caretaking—it's not like he's had much practice—but he understands that it eases them both.

How do you bridge sixteen years of absence and heartbreak? How do you take back something you had to forbid yourself from missing, because it was lost to you beyond any hope of recovery?

One awkward anecdote and offering of food at a time, maybe. It doesn't seem like a bad start.

With Magnus still asleep, they bundle up for a walk around the yard. After a moment's debate with himself, Alec borrows Magnus's cloak, since his own lies discarded somewhere between last night's battlefield and here.

In daylight, the homestead shows more signs of wear and tear. The roof is old, crumbling at the corners. The house abuts a tall granary on sturdy posts, with wooden stairs leading to the raised entrance. Two other storehouses cluster to the side. At the other end of the house, towards a fenced pasture, are the cowshed and stable, a coop for chickens, and finally, next to the stream that curves behind the house, a low, sod-roofed sauna in the shelter of two verdant elms.

"I don't know if you remember, but Mother's parents built most of this. Grandmother was from Skellige. You get your height from that side of the family." Izzy elbows him lightly. He surprises himself by laughing.

"You only got the stubborn islander nature, huh?"

"That, and Mother's lessons in not leaving myself at the mercy of others' decisions." She sighs. "Skelliger women manage their own property. Here, the moment you say your vows, the man takes over everything that's yours by birthright."

"I'm guessing that explains the lack of men around here." The main part of witcher initiates are men, but the women in their ranks are treated the same by their peers and elders, if not by the wider world. Sometimes Alec forgets how different it is for most common folk. "What about Jace?"

"That's a long story." Izzy wraps her arms around herself. "He didn't want to stay. He's not... he's the son of Father's best friend. He came to us when his parents died. He could've fought me for the inheritance and probably got a magister on his side, but since I'm the blood heir, the land is mine by default. Unless I marry."

"But you don't want to?"

They turn to amble back towards the stable. Horse and the Chancellor are crammed there next to Izzy's shaggy plough horse. When Alec cracks the door open, he's greeted by content neighs from the stalls.

"I have a trade, Alec." Izzy opens the double doors at the other end that lead to the pasture. "Mother taught me my letters. The Academy at Oxenfurt takes women students, too, and—and entry there isn't easy, but I could be a real physician. Some day. Rather than stay here and dig myself in this soil until I'm buried."

They let the horses out to graze. Alec eyes Horse and the Chancellor, free of their gear and allowed to roam at their leisure for the first time in days. They seem unbothered by the aging, mild-natured workhorse.

"I think I understand. If you feel like you're shackled here."

"You were gone for two thirds of my life and the moment you show up, like a gift from the goddess, I start complaining." Her voice is edged in irony. "I could sell the animals. The house is tougher. I could live with Jace for a while, but I'd need a nest egg."

"Sounds like you've been planning this." Enticed by the parsnip Alec saved from his plate, Horse pushes her head in over his shoulder, to Izzy's merriment.

"I'm not the only one with a plan, am I?" She strokes Horse's knotted mane; Alec sees in his future a toilsome hour with a brush and the tangles collected there.

"All right, you bottomless pit," he grouses fondly as Horse crunches up the morsel. "You earned it. Apples for the whole winter, once we get paid and—"

Right. His mind is full to brimming; too many things are shoving for space.

"What is it?"

"Izzy," he says, abrupt. A seed of worry is growing in his mind as to the long-term consequences of Magnus's injury. Witchers heal much quicker and better than ordinary people, but they're no less vulnerable while recovering. Magnus is hanging on, but he'll need somewhere to rest in safety. "About our hunt."

"You said something about griffins. I heard gossip in the village that something had killed a cow."

"Yeah." He starts pacing. Affronted by the lack of further treats, Horse lumbers off to join the other two in their cautious greeting rituals.

Put plainly, Alec needs to decide if he trusts Isabelle. He's slept under her roof, eaten at her table. He's put Magnus's life—achingly, unpredictably precious—in her hands. If he doesn't act fast, their hard-won prizes will rot in the glen, or be scavenged by some lucky trespasser.

He puts a hand on Izzy's shoulder. "Another long story short, I left a royal ransom in beast parts in the woods a few hours from here. If you've got a cart and a barn to cure some griffin hides in, I could... I mean. We're imposing on you. Magnus won't be well enough to travel for a while, and having us here, eating from your stores..."

A bevy of emotions play across her face, from amazement to something best described as _ oh, you_. "You're family, Alec. I'm not going to turn you away when you need me. You or your partner in witchering."

Again he finds himself mystified. _ Family. _ She says it so easily, even when he can read between the lines that the family he was taken from was not always as close or safe as that word seems to entail.

"Are you sure? You're here with, uh, Clary, and now you're adding two witchers, one of whom is your long-lost brother, and... I get the sense that you're already a bit infamous in these parts."

She throws her head back, a huffy laugh bubbling out of her. "The good people of Valewood take it as a personal slight that I sit here on fertile land and with a skill they need but no husband to put a bridle on me. Or even a brother. Someone honestly suggested I charmed Jace to leave. Made some witch's brew and forced his boots to walk him down the road."

Alec shakes his head, amused and a little aghast. She seems to have the situation under control, but a long-buried vein of protective anger flashes in him. 

What-ifs are the height of uselessness. Alec knows that well. He still entertains a fleeting fantasy of how things might have been if he'd been here, if he'd inherited the land like he was supposed to. He'd have been expected to cut a dowry for his sister, but she could've used that wealth to study instead, to turn her nimble mind to medicine and anatomy rather than the daily concerns of the farmstead.

The house isn't poor, but it's not much above that. It would also need more hands to stop its gradual decay.

"Should we go today?" Izzy says. "How far away is it?"

Alec gauges the weather. It is nearly freezing, but the moisture in the air portends a milder day tomorrow. The flesh is the first to go bad, but griffin meat is toxic to humans, so they won't want that anyway. "If we leave early tomorrow, we can make the most of the daylight. It's gonna be dirty work, though."

"Like mine isn't?"

It takes him a moment to realise that somewhere in the conversation, she invited herself along, and he never thought to refuse her.

*

For that day and night, Magnus drifts in and out of sleep. Izzy packed the claw wounds with a poultice wrapped in sheer hemp cloth. When she changes it, the cloth peels away pink, and Alec breathes out his pent-up anxiety. The fluids from the gashes could be a much worse colour. Alec crouches by Magnus's head and feeds him warm broth by patient spoonfuls. He swallows, but never wakes enough to talk. Izzy keeps him dosed with a draught of white myrtle and celandine, and the next morning, his fever has come down.

Clary returns in the evening with a basket of foodstuffs on her arm. She still gives Alec a berth, but sits with them for evening tea and natters to Izzy about the small news of the village. They sit close, Clary's knee slanted against Izzy's leg as she pulls her feet up onto the bench. So they're friends, Alec concludes, and resolves not to antagonise her further. Whatever Clary's story is, Izzy relaxes in her presence. It should be enough for him.

"Just as a tiny concern," Clary says in the morning, as Alec and Izzy have finished breakfast and Izzy is hunting for a pair of boots in a chest under the bench. "I don't _ mind _being left with the bedridden witcher who has no idea where he is, but if he does wake up, what do I tell him? Almost getting my throat cut got old after the first time."

"I think Izzy took away all his hidden knives," Alec says, with equal tartness. So much for no further antagonism.

"I did!" comes Izzy's contribution from the floor. "Unless he has them in _ really _interesting places."

Unaccountably, Alec flusters. "Not that I know. But, uh, you're right." He feels for the hook of his medallion, and sets it, still in its chain, on the narrow mantelshelf. "Show him that, and say Alec borrowed his horse, but isn't planning to sell it this time."

Clary bobs her chin in an approximation of a nod. "Right. Is that some secret witcher phrase?"

"Close enough."

As Clary steps over to Izzy for some final advice on tending to Magnus, Alec lets himself dwell in the doorway. Magnus's colour is high, after he sweated out the threatening inflammation, and his breaths rasp soft and steady. He sleeps heavily, held insensate by the draught.

Alec hates to leave him. He knows Izzy's doing her best, and she wouldn't leave a patient with Clary unless Clary was trustworthy, but Magnus is terrifyingly vulnerable like this. No amount of speed or wit will save him when he's too weak to even speak or sit up.

"I'll be back," Alec mutters under his breath. That makes three times he's said that to Magnus, without knowing if Magnus can hear him. A threefold promise is holy, say the priestesses of the goddess, made once for each of her aspects.

Izzy calls for him from the door, and Alec forces himself not to look back as he goes.

*

They lead the horses into the glen, and Isabelle lets out a loud, abrupt gasp.

A phantom of shock and wonder lingers in her voice. "When you said, 'oh, we killed two griffins', I was not prepared for this. You did _ this_? With two men and pointy sticks?"

"And a good horse," Alec says. Horse whinnies as if to agree that she is, indeed, an exemplary specimen.

Lying in the frosted grass in the tin-grey light of the morning, the griffins look more like toppled statues than corpses, sprawled and still. Birds have plucked at their eyes and exposed innards, but no large predator has happened upon the carcasses yet. The ride was shorter than Alec thought, though he was helped by Izzy's knowledge of the paths. They ended up foregoing a cart in favour of a travois, which Horse is pulling.

"They're huge." Izzy measures the gaping beak of the male with her palm. "I saw a mounted griffin head once, there was a merchant from Novigrad at a summer fair, but these are even bigger."

"They're a rare breed." Alec digs into their stash of tools: the axe for the wings, then the skinning implements. "It was... it was Magnus's idea. I wasn't convinced at first. A hunt like this is always risky."

"You seem pretty convinced to me." He's caught unawares by her smile, warm and shrewd, like she's remembered a happy secret she's not planning to share.

"I am now," he says, and, with a measure of relief, gets to work.

It's sweaty, filthy, backbreaking labour. They keep a fire going to have a supply of tea and somewhere to warm themselves. The rising day melts the frost into glistening damp. Izzy is no expert, but she's butchered livestock before, and takes Alec's guidance with only a few benign barbs in reply.

Alec saves the beaks and talons, and one whole paw to bring as a trophy to the merchant or whatever deputy he has left in Hartmoor. Griffin bone is prized for its strength and relative lightness, so they cut out as much as they reasonably can. The hides are heavy, made even more massive by the thickness of the plumage, but they're also the most valuable part.

Alec will breathe easier once they have all this under lock and key in the storehouse. He can tell Izzy's thoughts run along the same lines, though there is a scholarly fascination to the way she cracks a rib cage and then, pinching her nose, pokes at the slumped, half-frozen organs.

He's less sure what to do about the slow, appraising glances she throws his way when she thinks he isn't looking.

*

It's nightfall before they finish, and long after dark when they reach the farmstead. The travois is laden high, and Alec is walking the Chancellor because his saddle is piled with rolled-up batches of opinicus hide. The lit lantern greets them at the gate, clear in the moonless night.

The shimmer of a banked fire illuminates the kitchen as they trudge indoors at last, tugging at their muddy boots and soiled outer layers.

"—And that, my dear, is how I, a humble witcher, came into possession of a kingly horse that I hope my friend will indeed return." A cough punctuates Magnus's words but doesn't dampen his tone.

Clary giggles. "That is pretty good. Oh, they're back!"

At that point, Alec has rushed across the room, one glove on and his scarf hanging off his shoulder. Clary is sat on a stool, knitting a sock with a single bone needle. Beside her, in the cot, Magnus leans back on three heaped-up pillows, his hand curled to stifle his coughing. An empty cup sits on the bedside chest, the fragrance of the tea still in the air.

Magnus blinks up at Alec, heavy and glossy with lingering sleep.

Alec's voice fails him. Clary slips away to the main room to greet Izzy, but whatever they're saying dims into the background.

"Hey," Alec whispers, because he can't stand here dumbly and stare at the wonder of Magnus being awake and alive. "You missed a lot. It's good to see you."

"Likewise," Magnus says, the coarse echo of disuse still in his voice. "Seems you had quite the adventure while I was out of it."

Alec strips off the glove and scarf, then shrugs out of his borrowed jerkin. That leaves him considerably less covered in grime. "You could say that. Izzy helped me salvage most of the griffins. Maybe three fourths of what we might've got, in the best case. And Izzy is, uh, Isabelle. My—"

"Your sister." Magnus loads an admirable amount of wry whimsy into the words. Alec missed that, the way there seems to be no weight Magnus can't lighten with a quip.

"My sister." Alec lets himself fall into the gentle absurdity of it. "I'm still working through that. I think we're safe here for the time being, though."

"The company seems decent, too." Magnus hikes himself up another notch. He's sleep-hazy and mussed and Alec wants to put a hand on him to make sure he's real. "She did give me a candid piece of her mind regarding you. I told her that the first time we met, you threatened to break my nose on a table, so that's just how you say hello."

"Face," Alec says, half chastened, half sardonic, and goes to wash his hands in the basin Clary has left on the side table. "I said 'your face'."

"I stand corrected. I don't think she'll hold the knife incident against you for too long. She seems fond of your sister."

Magnus, for his part, seems to be well on his way to charming the household. He and Izzy are, Alec thinks, similar in many ways: clever, confident, curious. They ought to get along. Then again, Magnus could make a fence post gambol for him with a few honeyed words. 

"Guess we'll see. You're the one with the silver tongue."

"You don't know half the things I can do with my tongue," Magnus mutters. It's barely loud enough for Alec to hear, but it sends a memory pounding through his head of the day before, of the breathless moment before the battle when Magnus pulled him down and kissed him.

He shouldn't even mention the kiss here. He thinks he trusts Izzy. Izzy trusts Clary in her home. Whatever there is between him and Magnus now, it seems too unripe and tender for words.

Or else Magnus was simply playing, the way he does. It amuses him to tease and prod Alec, and he's never been cruel about it. Alec has accepted it as part of their weird companionship.

"I do know that if you want to ride again before winter, you need to rest." Autumn rushes in with force, and now they're above the lowlands that make up most of Velen. Frost and snow will arrive sooner. Both Magnus's injury and Alec's discovery of his family have upended their plans. Alec clutches at those ordinary concerns like a mooring.

"Oh, yes," Magnus says. "My least favourite part of convalescence. The avid boredom of doing nothing. Please tell me there are books in the house. Or someone to lose to me at cards."

"I'll ask Izzy, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. But sure, I'll play you a few rounds."

"Will you now?" Magnus narrows his eyes. It softens his face. "And what have you got that I'd care to win from you?"

It sounds too drowsy to be a come-on. Alec tells his lurching heart to settle down. "How about you worry about what I'll ask for when I win? Let's say, for every time I beat you, you'll rest quietly for a day."

"I'm forty-seven winters old, Alec. I know when I need to take it easy." Magnus huffs, then picks up Alec's medallion from the lid of the chest. "You could have just left me a note, instead of your professional emblem. Imagine what mischief an unscrupulous Cat could wreak with a Griffin medallion."

"You have a game leg," Alec says, arid. "Also, you've never seen my handwriting."

He bites down on _ you don't look a day over forty._ Witchers age—everything in the world ages—but if they avoid an end by violence, they can live several times as long as ordinary humans. He always guessed Magnus was older than him; his blasé air of worldliness and self-possession suggests as much.

"Here." Magnus presses the medallion into Alec's palm. His thumb lingers on the inside of Alec's wrist, stroking over the joint, slow and oddly gentle. "I appreciate the gesture, all the same."

Alec slides his hand down to Magnus's wrist and turns the grip into a firm warrior's clasp. "I'm glad to have you back."

Something wistful shimmers in Magnus's gaze before he smiles back at Alec. "It's another notch in the scabbard. Not dead yet, you know."

"Not dead yet."

They chortle over that, heads bent over their joined hands.

Then, Izzy bustles in with a basket of medical supplies at her hip to greet Magnus and tell Alec to light the stove in the sauna so they can wash up properly. The sounds and smells from the kitchen promise food, and Alec's stomach protests its state of woeful neglect. With a quick, sheepish grin at Magnus, he escapes to his own chores.

The feeling in Magnus's eyes follows him out, nameless but unshakable.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec deals with some matters of the heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pear is a darling and gave this the okay, so here you go, a new chapter at last!

The days blend into a week, then into a half-month.

Alec slots himself into the rhythms of the household in the way he best knows: by making himself useful. Izzy and Clary join him for the necessary toil of cleaning and preserving the griffin parts. Once that's done, he tells Izzy to give him whatever needs doing. He's no carpenter, but he can mend a fence or replace a creaking step.

At first, she tries to refuse him—_you're my guest, Alec_. In counterpoint, he tells her there's only so many times he can clean and fix his equipment—or Magnus's—before it becomes an exercise in inanity. With a laugh and a shake of her head, she gives in.

So, he and Izzy tackle a few repairs that have been left hanging. He makes a truce of sorts with Clary, and learns that she painted the chairs by the hearth, as well as the stylised flowers that hedge the windows and doors of the house. He spends hours at Magnus's bedside, talking or playing cards while Magnus is awake, working on various chores while he sleeps, needlessly watching over his dreams. His injuries are healing cleanly, but he's bone-weary and often in discomfort. Alec does what he can to keep his spirits up. Magnus has done him that favour often enough.

One crisp day, Alec and Izzy take a ramble into the woods beyond the house and come back with a deer and a few hazel grouse. Her hunting bow is not only for show, and when Alec asks who taught her, her voice softens on the answer: _You did. I just kept up the habit. _

He trails her back to the house, choked up with bemused affection.

The farmstead is on the fringes of the village, Valewood, and it's an hour's vigorous walk to the village green. Izzy ventures out mostly on market day, on which she fills her basket with herbs and tinctures and leaves before dawn, Clary in tow. Alec waves them off, wondering if he should have joined them. Rumour will catch on to his and Magnus's presence sooner or later, and they can't do much to hide either of their nature.

He's Isabelle's lost brother. It might be best that as far as her community knows, he remains lost.

Her position in the village seems established and yet precarious. She bucks custom and tradition by declaring herself independent, but her value as an herbalist and healer gives her leeway. Clary was recently orphaned, her mother killed by the Redanians, and she's been living with Izzy ever since. That explains her stark protective attitude to Isabelle: she curls around her one touchstone in the world and hisses at anybody that gets too close.

It's a common story, the loss of her mother. Her lot is not enviable.

One morning, with the full moon still a pearly phantom in the west, Izzy takes Alec down to the birch grove across the stream to see the three grave markers standing in a glade. Here, the beloved dead are buried close to the house, so they can watch over it from the beyond.

"Those are for Grandmother and Grandfather." She points to the oldest two, bleached by years of sun, and leans down to set her hand gently on the third. "And Mama."

They chat in the evenings, sometimes long into the night, putting together the years they've missed. Izzy always talks around their father, as nimble and light as the needle she wields on her mending basket. Alec needs to ask.

"What happened to Father?"

Izzy's stance tightens as she pulls herself in, steel in her voice. "He had an accident. Mother refused to treat him, so his family took him away. He's buried there, in his birth village. Mother was left with Jace and me. It was... it was the second worst year of my life."

Alec has barely any memory of his father. At most, there is a vague ominous feeling, as if he's locked himself away from those images. _ A witcher saved my father's life. He took me as payment. _It's not as if families don't sell their children, or men their wives, in times of hardship. You do many things to survive in the world.

He says, his throat full, "The second worst?"

"After the year we lost you." Izzy drags her heel through the fallen leaves that cover the glade. "I think that's where it started. Father let you be taken, and Mother never forgave him for it, not in her heart of hearts. It all festered over time."

"Because of me." Alec drops onto his haunches. Nausea presses a curved nail against his windpipe. Words slur in his mind. He doesn't know what staggered him, not until Izzy is crouched beside him, her palm spread over his back.

"You didn't do that," she whispers. "I adored you. You were Jace's _world_. I don't know what you do or don't remember, Alec, but it was not your fault."

He breathes out. Then in. He feels like a dry riverbed soaked with snowmelt, the torrent washing away the layers of fear and fabrication that have gathered on top of his own history.

"Then why?" He can't say that the question has hounded him, but it's always been there, on the verge of his vision, caught in glimpses but never close enough to pin down. _ They were able to let me go. That means they didn't care. _

It is a child's idea, an absolute that doesn't heed the vagaries of existence. Choose between giving away your son and having a spiteful witcher torch your house. Choose the one mouth to be sent away so the others can be fed. Choose to live free and risk the wrath of the world, or bow your head and live a shadow life, a half life, made safe by your own dread.

That last sentiment sounds too much like Magnus.

Izzy lays her head on his shoulder. Without another thought, he pulls her close. "I don't know," she says. "I've tried to think about it, ever since you came here, but I was too young. Old enough to understand you were gone, but not old enough to ask the right questions. Father tried to..." She looks up.

"Go on."

"Looking back, I think Father tried to make Jace take your place. To be the firstborn son he needed. After you were gone, Jace was never totally at home here again." She swallows. "You were the first person he trusted, when he came to us. He couldn't stand the thought of... of replacing you. When Mama died, he left soon after. Not without talking to me, we both agreed to it, but I think he's happier now. Away from here."

Grief weaves such strange webs. For the last month, Alec has been _ crowded _ by other people in comparison to his usual solitude. Even his winters spent in Kaer Seren feel less busy; the old fortress is huge for the handful of witchers and initiates that inhabit it. Now, he's had first Magnus and then also Izzy and Clary around from morning to night.

He imagined himself as a chip tumbled from a cliff face, a clean cut whose marks time would wear away. Instead, ties still run from him to Isabelle, to Jace, whom he hasn't even met again yet—and, as a fragile, misty thing, to Magnus.

"It's gonna be some time before we can go to Oxenfurt," he says. "Magnus wanted to write to his friend there. I figure you—or I, or both of us—should write to Jace."

"I may already have," Izzy admits. "I didn't send it yet! I had to collect my thoughts, so I started telling him about you. You can read it over, make sure I didn't say anything unflattering."

"Sounds good." He sighs slowly. "Speaking of, I should make a trip back to Hartmoor. To see a man about a purse of crowns. Can I leave Magnus in your capable hands?"

She laughs. It sounds relieved. "Sure. Though I'm pretty sure you're his favourite entertainment."

"Only because I'm easy." Alec wishes he could snatch back that sentence when her amusement bubbles over into giggles. "I mean, he can always talk circles around me. You'd be a tougher target."

"Of course." She kisses the top of his head with sisterly temerity.

*

Two days later, well before dawn, Alec is checking his gear one more time, the fluttering rushlight on the table enough for him to see by, when the floorboards sound in the corner.

He said his goodbyes to Izzy and Clary in the evening. They'll wake up in a while to tend to the animals, but he wants to get as much as he can out of the promise of a clear day that the evening sky spelled out.

He was going to look in on Magnus before he left. It's become a habit, a reassurance he permits himself: to know that Magnus is safe. That Alec did not fail him, in the end.

"You're going, then."

Magnus supports himself on the doorjamb, his weight off his right leg. He's in his own loose trousers and one of the shirts Izzy gave Alec to wear. Alec helped him shave the other day; he looks much less unkempt now, though his hair is messily tied with twine. His eyes are soft and alert.

"What are you doing out of bed?" Alec's voice doesn't catch. He doesn't watch Magnus's throat bob and remember the feel of his skin under his fingertips. Not in the least.

"Dear Isabelle tells me I should start moving about." Magnus shifts like he might take a step on the spot, and Alec hurries to steady him. With a huff of laughter, Magnus drapes his arm around Alec's shoulders and leans on him. "She may have meant I might try standing up, rather than hobbling forth like a drunkard. Maybe the bench, if you'd be so kind?"

Alec has no first-hand experience of injuries as severe as Magnus's; he could only guess how long it would take to mend. A witcher's bones will set and bear strain in a month or two, and the deep cuts to Magnus's leg are knitting with similar speed. He's had decent food, meticulous care, and bed rest, so the odds are in his favour. Still, Alec does most of the work in getting him to the bench, where Alec's bed is still unmade. Magnus sits down on the wool-stuffed pallet.

"Thank you. That's better."

"Can I get you something before I go?"

"No. Though, if by some miracle you can find me something new to read in Hartmoor, I'll take it gladly. I'm impressed your sister has a copy of _ Adalbert's Bestiary_, and her herbaria are captivating, but they're both a touch professional for light reading."

"Didn't fancy her Skelligen poetry, did you?" Magnus has devoured Izzy's collection of five books like a man starved.

"I've learned _ Torgeir the Red _by heart. Which may be useful if I ever find myself in Kaer Trolde and need to thrill a brace of burly seafarers."

A smile creeps onto Alec's face. "You never know. We might not make it to Oxenfurt before the snows, but the coin from the hunt should tide us over. Though I'm cutting Izzy a slice of the purse for piecing you back together."

"I'd never suggest otherwise." Magnus turns to sit so he can extend his bandaged leg along the bench. The range of his cautious mobility both surprises and soothes Alec. "That does raise a question. Have you given any thought to your next destination? Or are you staying a while? Isabelle seems very happy to have you."

"She is, but she's also got winter stores for two people, not three." Alec almost ends the sentence on a different number. "The hunt prize would help, as long as there's somebody to buy things from."

"There's always someone." Magnus shrugs lightly. "Acquisition is merely a matter of arrangements."

"Sounds like merchant wisdom." Magnus is settling in for a chat, so Alec gets out another mug and pours the remains of his breakfast tea for them. It has steeped to an inky density; with only a twinge of guilt, he adds a spoon-tip of Izzy's precious honey to each cup.

"More like vagabond wisdom. As thankful as I am for all your efforts—yours and the ladies'—I have been thinking. Oxenfurt is on the way to Novigrad. I could say hello to Catarina and then go on."

To _Novigrad _of all places? A glower pulls at Alec's brow. Worry curdles in his gut. He hasn't really considered the future beyond making sure Magnus recovers. If he left for Kaer Seren today, he'd have to race the winter there before the snow and ice turned the passes into death traps. He'd rather cross the Pontar and take his chances in Nilfgaard in the south.

"Planning to sail to the court of Kaer Trolde after all?" he says. "It's just, the way I hear it, nothing good comes out of Novigrad lately." Only fearful whispers and the stench of the pyres. The Eternal Fire is turning the city's fonts of commerce into crucibles for those it brands as unclean. In spite of the still-red hearth, a shiver grips Alec.

"I wasn't looking to take up the minstrel's art, no. Novigrad is big enough to vanish in, even with the witch-hunters rattling their hilts in the streets." Magnus tries the tea. Usually, he'd make a comment on the aroma or a guess at the ingredients, but now he just sips pensively.

"That's what you want? To vanish?" That doesn't sound like the Magnus Alec knows.

"I have some friends I might chase down." The rushlight dyes Magnus's eyes with capricious copper. "I'm relying on your kindness. I value it—I'm in your debt for it—but it's not a boon one should expect to last forever. Surely you understand."

_ No. No, I don't understand. I never thought you owed me for this. You're there and it's in my power to help you, so I do. Like Izzy does. Because she can and because she wants to. _

Alec's tongue sticks itself to his teeth, his lips parched of words. He wraps up the last of his provisions and fits them in his pack. He has his cloak, recovered from their hunting camp, and the fur-lined coat Izzy dug out of storage that belonged to his grandfather. It might be too warm for the weather, but with the route he planned, the ride to Hartmoor and back will take him a solid two weeks. Taking the detour will help him avoid the dregs of the Redanian army.

"You better not leave before I get back," he says. "If you want your share of the coin, at least."

"I'm still a few weeks from horseback, I'm afraid," Magnus says, philosophical. "The Chancellor's taken a shine to Biscuit, and she to him, so at least he's not pining for attention in a dank stable corner."

Alec should laugh, or comment on Magnus's whimsical nickname for Clary, or argue that Izzy's stable may be tiny, but never dank. He can't find the humour in himself, not when Magnus is talking of blowing out of his life like an autumn leaf, as easily as he entered it.

The Path joins with others and diverges again. Change is the only constant found upon it.

"I should go." From between the shutters, Alec can see a shift in the darkness outside, from black to blue. He fastens his cloak.

"Alec." The sound of his name arrests him. Magnus sets his hands in his lap, the tips of his fingers pressed to his thigh. His voice is smooth and low, without artifice. "If I've done anything to discomfort you, you may please forget it. I don't expect anything from you that you're not willing to give."

"Uh," Alec says, the blunt opposite of Magnus's measured tones. "You haven't. Done anything."

Magnus quirks a brow, as if to call that out for the blundering evasion it is.

Alec can't do what Magnus seems to accomplish without effort: he can't circle and swoop about his own desire, use it to fuel a crass joke one moment and wield it to his advantage the next. He can't wear it as the badge of defiance that it is for Magnus. He's only ever known how to strangle it into silence.

Magnus makes him want to give it a voice. If not a shout, then a whisper, a spark in the darkness.

When he looks at Magnus, every tangled, tender thing he feels is naked in that look, striving across the room. "Wait for me."

Magnus breathes in, then drops his gaze. "Be careful on the road."

With a quick nod, Alec turns to the door. The dawn cold hits him and he pushes into it, into the biting, empty air that asks nothing of him. He saddles Horse and leads her out the gate without a backward glance.

Only when he is at the bend in the road where the trees swallow the sleeping house, he lets himself wave, to the homestead and whatever little gods watch over it, to the people it shelters.

Then he urges Horse into a brisk pace, riding away so he can return.

*

The days skim by in a drab succession, watery sunlight fading into the austere dusks of mid-autumn. Alec falls back into his own solitary habits: he rides as swiftly as he can, from first light until darkness if Horse doesn't tire out sooner. The season offers little solace for the traveller. The roads are churned into gelid black mud and frost weighs down the nights. He crawls into abandoned barns and hunter's cabins to sleep, on those nights when he can't find an inn.

To the others on the road, a dribble of merchants and peasants and refugees, he dons his usual guise of the lone hunter. His swords are wrapped in with his bow, hidden from most curious eyes. Travel and trade are petering out with the slow advent of winter. The route is new to him, but Izzy advised him well. The most dismal part is the two days that he and Horse sit in the ruins of a fire-hollowed stone house and watch the yard around it swell into a momentary bog. There's no point in riding through the sheeting rain.

He remembers the days when he would've drifted through this quiet time on his own: sleeping, cooking, doing sword forms, nattering to Horse. Now, he keeps hearing the sounds of other voices in the rainfall. A stray memory makes him want to take it to Izzy to see if she has any matching pieces to fit to it. He hums a tune and turns to ask Magnus if he knows the rest, only to remember that he's alone.

How quickly Alec got used to him.

Magnus comes into his dreams, too, in vivid, skittish detail that leaves him gasping awake, his body alight with want and hope and fear. They're not even the kind of smudged, brilliant images that first told him his lusts ran a crooked and treacherous course. Those Alec has learned to ignore.

These dreams speak of something real, and are more dangerous for it. Moments upon moments, clear and jagged as glass shards: Magnus in the emerald-green glade where they sparred, the blade of his sword feather-light against Alec's unprotected neck. _ I got you_, he said, then flicked his sword away, and Alec's blood sang in his ears.

He dreams of Magnus across the campfire, laughing at some story Alec told, the flame shadows on his face turning him into something at once unknown and inviting. 

Magnus's hand glancing across his own as they shared a chore; Magnus's voice warm with approval as they planned the hunt and Alec came up with a solid idea; Magnus with his shirt unlaced, not provoking but simply at his ease, baring the old scars that Alec wanted to follow with his fingertips where they vanished under the linen.

Alec stirs from that last dream to find himself breathing hard, his skin prickling, his cock thick between his legs.

He and his hand are well enough acquainted: he's mastered the knack of getting himself off fast and rough, his mind carefully blank. This time the pooled need is tinged with something besides built-up frustrations, like a lingering taste in the water when you've drunk wine from the same cup. It fills his throat with gentle pressure.

Alec kicks off his blankets and goes to dunk his head in the brimming rainwater barrel left in the yard. The icy water washes the shaky desire from him.

_ Wait for me. _What kind of godsdamned thing was that to say? Alec is no knight-errant from a Toussaint fairytale, and Magnus certainly is no fair maiden—or youth, for the sake of the argument—for him to vanquish monsters for.

_ You're an idiot, and if he's ridden off to Novigrad by the time you finally get back, it's only what you deserve. _

The next day, Alec pushes both himself and Horse on past the ragged edge of fatigue. They're close enough to Hartmoor that making camp for another night is more trouble than it's worth. More importantly, the gruelling day in the saddle will send him into a deep sleep. Maybe it'll be enough of a barrier to the grasping tendrils of this new, disquieting awareness.

He reaches the Hart's Head after midnight. Spending a handful of coppers on a bed, he stumbles upstairs and falls face-first into the linens.

That night, he doesn't dream.

*

At noon, Alec steps out of the common room where he met Magnus some six weeks ago, the coin purse tucked under his coat. Even without Magnus there to do the gladhanding, the merchant's secretary counted out the agreed fee in Novigradian crowns. The horses and guards milling in the yard signal the departure of the re-fitted caravan, so Alec takes himself out from under foot.

He divides the coin and hides it about his things. Even split in two, it's a small fortune. Magnus would have wrung a few more crowns from the merchant, but Alec's happy to escape with his rightful dues. He's intimidated a few ornery clients into honouring their word, but he doesn't relish using his strength and stature to cow others. As hardscrabble as a witcher's life can be, most people who ask for his service are trod down even lower themselves. He at least has his skills and his freedom. Wherever the paths of the world lead, he can follow.

He needs to return to Valewood and pay Magnus and his sister their shares. Then there is Oxenfurt and the promise of more reunions. Izzy put a letter to Jace in the bag of a courier going west. Any reply may take its sweet time, but the arrow is in flight.

After that, the future seems as vast and without feature as the cloudless sky. Alec's been yanked free from his well-worn rut, and he wobbles like a loose cartwheel.

He overhears a pair of villagers at the gate to the inn chattering about an autumn market at the crossroads downstream. They don't spook at him so much he can't ask for directions, and on what can only be called a whim, he turns onto the road southwest instead of the way he came.

It's one day. If the weather holds, he can make up the time.

*

The market is held outside the grange of some local lord. The splay of carts and stalls and people exudes a ragged, stubborn kind of cheer. However hard the war stomped across the region, the harvest is done and all its plenty is on offer. Alec can't help the stares he draws with his blades slung over his shoulder, but today, they don't make him want to shirk. As long as nobody starts trouble, he's one more market-goer among the rest.

He wanders along the aisles, past the stages where children gather around a puppet show or men compete at feats of strength. Fragrant, greasy smoke billows from the kitchen-tents as meat skewers and grilled fish are passed out into held-out bowls. An herbalist's covered cart piques his curiosity, and he rues his own lack of forethought: he could've brought Izzy back some things, if he knew what she needs.

The green-eyed young man tending the cart sells him a bevy of common remedies: white myrtle, bloodmoss, drakeroot, hag's-nose, all things his medicine kit has been sorely missing. The seller hands him the bundle with a smile that might have, not too long ago, made him blush and bolt, for fear that the candid friendliness of a stranger hid a trap.

Few people smile at witchers. When they do, they're after something—a favour or a distraction. And Alec has learned to avert his eyes from handsome men, even when his eyes would like to linger.

He smiles back, a twitch of his mouth, and doesn't pull his hood up as he goes.

Farther along, a pair of scribes are selling their services, as well as paints and inks, paper and brushes. They mostly attract the better-dressed clientele, ladies in fur-hemmed cowls, Oxenfurt merchants in sumptuous blue, even the mud on their boots more distinguished than that on the shoes of the common folk—and a priest of the Eternal Fire, his white hood cleaving the crowd. An armoured guard rattles at his heels.

Alec waits behind a bannered tent until the priest is gone. This far from Novigrad, only an organised party of witch-hunters or soldiers might pose a true threat.

The Mahakaman smith in the tent has a variety of metalwork on display: buckles and brooches, ladles and skewers of dark iron, silver and bronze a-glimmer. Alec picks up a bronze bracelet shaped into a coiled serpent, its eyes two drops of amber. It reminds him of a tale Izzy told him about the Crone's needle: the black serpent that swims the night waters, whispering the secrets of poisons and remedies into the ears those brave enough to listen. It was her favourite story as a child, she said, both enticing and terrifying.

He buys the bracelet. Then he goes to the scribes and gets three little jars of paint and a sheaf of paper. The stall has a rickety shelf of books on the side. From behind the prayer books and almanacs, Alec pulls out a volume of paper pages bound between slats of wood whose brilliant paint has cracked in spidery patterns. Alec can't read the script, but he recognises it, from a letter Magnus wrote to his friend Catarina.

"If you want it, traveller, the book's yours for a crown. Zerrikanian legends, or so I'm told. It's pretty, but there's not a soul in these parts that can read it."

If it was vellum, you could scrape the pages clean and write them over. Paper doesn't suffer such reuse. Alec leafs through the book and the margins illuminated with curling vines and flowers. A small-town scribe might be hard put to find an appreciative buyer.

He pays the scribe the asking price and bundles the book in with his other purchases.

It's a surprise the priest didn't raise a stink over heathen texts on offer to corruptible minds, he thinks, darkly amused. The book could contain anything: heretical philosophy, lewd verse, amorous guidance of the kind that would scorch the ears of bashful northerners.

Oh, Alec's hopeless. Magnus isn't even _ here_, and Alec is filling in his side of the conversation yet again. Magnus would be that audacious, even in the face of the Eternal Fire's brands and sanctions.

The thought makes Alec restless: worried, yes, but also another kind of unsettled. His memory of Magnus is a live ember in his heart, unquenchable once kindled. He has known want: practical needs, the dreamlike longing for the family he'd lost, fancies for pleasures or diversions he seldom let himself have. This is different. He builds this desire like a temple; stone after stone falls into place under his hesitant hands that yet will not, can not stop working.

He thinks he doesn't want to stop.

*

Ice patterns the stones of the ford as Alec steers Horse across the stream. She huffs and puffs, but trundles on bravely, as if his excitement were catching on to her, too. A few paltry miles separate them from their destination. Over the last hill and then along the side of the woods.

Before the place where the road forks, Alec passes three young men walking in a close huddle, their eyes darting across the fields and thickets. Their shoulders are hunched with purpose, though they ease their strides at the sound of his approach. He tugs his collar up and nudges Horse into a trot before they can get a good look at him.

Horse whisks past them in a plume of raised dirt, and their hollers are lost in the din of her hooves. Belted coats, sheathed knives, no other tools, Alec notes in a quick glimpse. They're a ways from the village. They'll think him a courier or a woodsman, and either fiction is fine with him.

Rounding the next bend in the road, he sees movement—a flash of colour—behind a row of brush separating two fields. Horse halts at his sign.

The figure picking a cautious path towards the road resolves into Clary, whose red braid spills untidily from her kerchief. Leaf litter speckles her skirts and shawl.

Alec's first instinct is to raise his voice. He doesn't. Horse should be familiar to her, even in the nearing twilight, so he lets her come to the road.

"Did you see them?" is the first thing she says. Up close, her face is strung tight. "There was somebody behind me, I'm sure of it."

She has a basket strapped to her back. Her errand to the village seems to have taken an ill-favoured twist.

"Nice to see you, too," he says, with a hint of tart humour. "You look like you could use a ride."

"That'd make it easier to shake them." Her eyebrow arches in kind. "Before you ask: everyone's fine. Except for me, right now, a bit, thanks to some asshole from the village following me."

Multiple assholes, in fact, but Alec doesn't say that. He frees his foot from the stirrup so she can use it, and his hand, as leverage to climb up. The saddle is pretty laden, but she fits herself behind him and grabs on to his belt.

"Hang on tight."

She swallows a whoop of mingled alarm and delight as Horse surges forward. The trees meld into a blur of pale trunks and shifting shadows around them, and the added burden of Clary's weight hardly impedes their pace. They'll outstrip their pursuit in no time, and the tracks they leave on the road will be concealed by the dusk. Alec doesn't think idle village ruffians will be so dedicated as to—well, they're already trailing a woman on her way home. That's sinister enough.

His first meeting with Clary comes back to him. He pushes Horse until they're well past the crossroads and on the final stretch before the farmstead. Clary clutches on to him like a bouncy sort of burr, then leans back as Horse slows into a walk.

"What was going on there? You all right?" Horse's flanks heave, her breaths loud and rough, so Alec dismounts to lead her, allowing Clary to clamber up into the saddle.

"A couple of bored idiots saw me and thought I'd be good entertainment." She pinches her mouth small. "I know the byroads. I'd have made it home in one piece."

He should have insisted Izzy tell him about their grief with the villagers. Two women—even when one of them has Izzy's skill with a bow and the other is as quick to bite and kick as Clary—living on their own would face a chancy existence anywhere, but the close-knit rural community makes it worse. Anybody that sticks out is liable to get beaten down.

"Do they know you have guests?" He can't yet see the lantern through the trees. "Magnus and me, I mean."

"In the village? I haven't told anybody, but sooner or later somebody's gonna come looking for Izzy." Clary sniffs. "Most of them are fine. They don't bother us. They need Izzy too much."

"That sounds familiar," Alec mutters. "Funny how people bark at you until you're the only one that can help them, and then suddenly they're all honey and roses. It's just—who's watching _ her _back?"

"Me," Clary says, firm. It makes Alec look up at her. Her head is held high, her eyes straight ahead. "I know you're her blood family. She's so happy you came back, it's both sweet and a bit sickening. But she saved me. I was lost, and Izzy found me. I won't let anybody hurt her."

_ You're a farm girl with a vicious streak and a plucky attitude. That won't get you too far_. Alec could say that. Who is he to say that? He was recruited, too young to say either yes or no, for an order that barely clings to its gloried history. He's fast and strong and skilled enough to go toe to toe with creatures that would make veteran knights wet themselves. He's also, to most of the world, an unwelcome vagrant, fated to wander until he meets some beast to outmatch him.

Maybe he was lost all his life, and he's only just been found.

"That goes for you and me both," he says. "For as long as I'm here, at least."

Clary hums. "Good. Then we get each other."

They walk on in silence that verges on companionable. The twilight deepens.

"Clary! Is that you, Alec?"

Up ahead, the gate rattles as Izzy slips through it. She flies down the path, her unbound hair a banner behind her, and barrels into Clary's arms so that they spin around each other, pressed together. Izzy mumbles something into her kerchief, then kisses her soundly on her smudged brow.

"Hey, it's fine, I'm fine. I'm sorry I'm late." Clary extricates herself. "Look who I found on the road."

Alec knows he reeks of horse and the long ride, but Izzy doesn't seem to mind. She buries herself in his hug without reservation. "Hey, stranger. Aren't you a sight for sore eyes."

"You too." With a blink, he accepts a softer peck on the cheek from his sister. So, now he is also somebody who gets welcomed to places with prickly banter and open arms. He can live with that. "Sorry I'm tardy, too. Had to wait out some rain. I brought gifts? Sort of? To make up for it."

"Did you now?" Concern makes room for mischief in Izzy's eyes. "I'm going to guess your quest for payment went well."

Once they're all through the gate, Clary latches it behind them and unhooks the lantern from its nail. Firelight shines in warm bands through the partly closed shutters of the house windows. With an oddly satisfied sigh, Alec drapes an arm around Izzy's shoulders. "I got what I came for. Happy ending, as they go, in this trade."

"He's in the stable," she says, because of course that was going to be Alec's next question, and she has no right to be so deft at pre-empting them. "Clary and I can unload Horse, and you can take a moment to say hello. Though, please also tell Magnus I won't need to borrow the Chancellor to look for my wayward love, after all."

"Sure, I'll—" Robbed of any chance of comfortable Horse-tending routine and smacked in the face by the way Izzy says _ love _ all at once, Alec lets Clary pluck the reins from his hand. "He's in the _ stable_?"

"He's been up for a week or so. No, I've never seen anyone walk a month after that kind of injury, but then I've never had a witcher as a patient." Izzy grins, unabashed. "Don't worry. I'm keeping my incandescent curiosity about how that works in check."

If she ever makes it to Oxenfurt, the Academy won't know what hit it.

"Your restraint is appreciated, Iz. You sure we shouldn't keep an eye out?"

"Look at the clouds. It's getting dark, and it might rain soon. They're not that keen to heckle us."

He takes care to mimic her blithe tone. "If you want any heads stuck on your fence posts, say the word."

The dark flicker in her expression tells him she hears how sincere he is, underneath the repartee. Then she shoves him gently in the arm. "Go. Supper in a bit, sauna after that. You look like you could use both."

"But not _ too _much like I've ridden through muddy roads for weeks?"

"Alec," she says, and steals the gloves he just took off. "When you've been missed sorely enough, you can only look like a blessing."

"Right." His heart stings and he can't pin down why. It's about Izzy and her wit and her solace and the way she's refuting his doubts, and even about Clary a little, and especially about the short, staggering walk across the yard to the stable. "I'm going."

*

The stable door is propped open, and a lantern glows next to the doorway. Squinting past the candle, his eyes still sensitised to the near dark, Alec glimpses the Chancellor's silvery side. The horse is bridled but not saddled. A cane is set against the side of a stall, carved from a single piece of oak, lacquered with age and use. It likely belonged to one or the other of his grandparents.

Magnus moves sure-footed even without the cane as he steps around the Chancellor, wearing a borrowed coat, the loosened sleeves turned up. Alec has to stop and drink him in slowly, as if he might grow heady just from looking at Magnus: his face, ruddy with the cold, the sheen of restored health on him, the sudden softness of his eyes.

"There you are." Magnus doesn't break the spell so much as lighten it, his voice mellow with, evidently, the simple pleasure of seeing Alec. "How was it? Dreary, I'm guessing. There's no amount of romance you could sprinkle on autumn roads to make them anything but miserable."

Then, just as Alec is dragging back every stupid, sentimental thing he might have said, in favour of something more in tune with Magnus's quip, Magnus wraps him into a hug, clasping him close like it were the most natural thing to do. Alec stifles his surprise into the solid warmth of Magnus's shoulder.

"It was mostly boring as fuck," he says, laughter welling up all of sudden. "I love Horse, I do, but she's not too talkative. Would've been more fun with you there."

"I wouldn't dream of ranking above her in your affections." Magnus draws back, his eyes twinkling with cheer. "A witcher and their horse. You don't step into that."

"That's like comparing birds and fish." Alec's hand lingers on Magnus's side, but so does Magnus's on his arm. "Also, way to make this weird."

"I sincerely beg your pardon." Alec has rarely seen Magnus look less sincere. "Those long weeks of staring at the same wall may have dulled my famed wit. At least now I have the whole farmstead to prance around on."

"You're up to prancing, huh?"

"With a bit of effort. Frolicking, on the other hand, is still beyond me. As are various other delights, such as—" Magnus cuts himself off a tad too sharply.

Alec's free hand goes to Magnus's shoulder of its own accord. "Is something wrong?"

"No." Magnus smiles, in that quiet way that always seems to hold a dash of self-irony. "Not at all, now that you're back hale and whole. I did miss you."

Somehow that pushes Alec on, that sliver of unmasked feeling in Magnus's bearing. "Yeah. Me too. Uh—there was the thing you said to me before I left, if you remember? I never really answered that."

"I remember." Magnus's fingers close around Alec's bare wrist.

Alec barely knows what he's doing, and he's sure it shows, but when he bends his head, Magnus meets him in the middle. His lips open to Alec's testing kiss, soft and then wet and dazing as their mouths fit to one another. Grasping Alec's collar with steadfast fingers, Magnus leans in to mould himself to Alec's body. His tongue presses sweetly into Alec's mouth, and Alec almost breaks away at the abrupt, wrenching want that stirs in his stomach.

Instead, he takes hold of Magnus and gathers him in, welcomes the heat and strength of him, allows himself to be so studied. He's never been touched with such a mixture of care and fascination. The light dances in Magnus's eyes when he opens them again. His fingers are flat to Alec's hammering heart.

"I don't mind," Alec whispers. "In case you couldn't tell."

"I can tell, sweet thing." Magnus sweeps an indulgent thumb across Alec's cheek. "And if you wouldn't mind, say, fewer layers of inconvenient winter clothes between us..."

Alec nips his eyes shut so he won't just combust from that thought. "Right. I'm pretty sure Izzy is waiting politely to bring my tired horse in here, and I'm kind of starving, but—can we pick this up tonight? I'll find a quiet corner for us."

"That sounds good." Magnus tilts up to steal one more kiss, like this is something they do all the time, trade kisses in twilit stables and talk about sharing the night hours. "It'd be a sad turn of events if you fell over from hunger, too."

Even with the sensation of Magnus's mouth still on his, it feels bold to rest their heads together. Their faces frame a space like a tiny sanctuary. "I thought about you," Alec murmurs, "all the time."

Magnus lets out a choked little sound, a wrinkle of nerves in his smooth warmth. "Well. A statement like that calls for copious detail. You must tell me more."

They part with mutual reluctance, and Magnus's hand tarries on Alec's chest before he lets it drop away.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since a few people have asked (or maybe will ask): yes, I've seen The Witcher on Netflix, yes, I thought it was a lot of fun, no, I'm not going to change things around due to the show lore being a bit different.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The course of honest lust never did run smooth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story officially doubled its chapter count in the telling. Chapter 8 will be the last one. Bear with me for a little more.
> 
> Mindy, Jilly and Pear were their usual glorious selves and helped this chapter happen.

Alec stretches himself out on the wooden bench and lets his shoulders go slack, his saddle-stiffened spine loosen. As comforts go, the sauna is one idea the Skelligers get too little credit for. The candle on the windowsill lays slats of shimmering yellow on the ceiling, limning the drifting steam.

The damp heat from the steam and the stove makes him drowsy, languid with the knowledge that he has no farther to go tonight. He won't sleep under every blanket he has and still wake up shuddering.

He did endure a bout of teasing from Izzy when he asked if the summer quarters in the granary loft were still usable, this late in the year. She laughed, but also helped him dig up a brazier and some sheepskins to warm the loft.

At supper, Alec passed out his gifts. The look on Clary's face as she unwrapped the paints made him balk, sure he'd managed to upset her, before she took his hand and squeezed it wordlessly.

_ Her mother painted, too_, Izzy told Alec in an undertone. _ We haven't been able to get her any new supplies for a long while. _

For her part, Izzy divined the thought behind the bracelet and tucked herself fondly against Alec's side. He's getting used to how easily she sneaks into his space.

Magnus took the book, awkwardly offered, and chortled at Alec's suggestion that its contents might be scandalous. _ I'm afraid not. That's not to say these stories have no spice. I'd be happy to read some to you all later. _His hand kept returning to the illuminated cover, something wistful in the traces of his fingers along the intricate figures.

Alec might be—_is_—paying too much attention to Magnus's hands. To his laughter, the shape of his mouth, the way he leaned close during the meal. Longer stints of walking or standing still tire him, but supported by the cane, he kept pace with Clary as they strolled around the yard.

_ Can we pick this up tonight? _ Alec asked Magnus, like he knew what he was on about. What does he want from Magnus? What is he allowed to want? And what is Magnus looking for in _ him_?

He sloshes too much water onto the hot stones of the stove, which disgorge an eye-watering amount of steam. Otherwise the sauna is dark and calm; it soothes him, even when it can't silence his unquiet thoughts. He'll be soaked very clean by the time he's done thinking.

In a way, thinking seems counterproductive, too. Magnus has made clear the nature of his interest. Surely it _ helps _that Magnus trusts him, is fond of him in some way, but you don't kiss somebody like that for the pleasure of their company. Magnus wants to bed him. However callow Alec feels at times, he gets that.

Once Magnus is healed, they may part ways for good. If Alec means to say yes, he'd better take the chance.

Movement in the entryway snaps him into alertness. Inhaling, he braces against the bench to roll down into a crouch, before reason quells over-wary instinct. He's home. Nobody's coming through the door to try and knife him.

Thus, still on his back on the bench, he gets an upside-down view of Magnus peeking in. "Am I intruding?"

"Oh. Hey." If a single god gave a damn about Alec, he wouldn't be sprawled here naked and flushed, his hair sticking to the wood, stewing in suspect thoughts about this man. "Did I take too long?"

"No, no. Isabelle is of the mind that I could test this little marvel of yours without risking my leg. I thought I'd ask if you wanted company." Magnus does an admirable job of keeping his eyes to Alec's face. Not that Alec would mind if he looked.

It's not as if he'd tumble Magnus _ here_. It's not as if Magnus and his uncovered body are a great mystery, after weeks of camp life and a few more of helping Magnus through his recovery.

You go to the sauna with family, with friends. Izzy's joined him a couple of times, and it stopped being odd after a moment. Alec is half a Skelliger, so he probably ought to live up to that.

Sitting up, he taps the bench next to him. "There's plenty of room."

Magnus's supple agility is tempered by his limp, and in the low light the healing cuts on his thigh are dramatic, carved deeper by the shadow that lies sharp on the scar tissue. He upends a bucket of water on himself, plastering his hair to his neck in a sluicing ribbon, then sits down. Alec reels back his impulse to hover.

A dash of water on the stones calls forth a gentler gout of steam. Rolling his shoulders, Magnus exhales. "Mmm, that is good. No wonder you were laid out here like some delectable offering. This makes me think of the volcanic baths in the Rose Arbour, in Sumira."

"Seems a lot more opulent than a sauna my grandfather built," Alec says, because it's easier than facing the first part of Magnus's comment.

"Sumira is a city in Ofir. The jewel of the western mountains. My horse was born there. And I spent some time there while I was training."

The lines of Magnus's frame are a touch softer, like the features of his face. He's lost some muscle, no doubt, but he also looks better fed and somehow more content than when they first met. It is, Alec decides, a good change. His body will recall its strength as soon as he's up to proper exercise again.

Alec leans back on his hands. "Tell me about it. The city or the training." 

Magnus regales him with both: moonlit hunts for lightning lizards in the mountain barrens, armed only with a dagger; races across the rooftops; knife-throwing at dawn and meditation in the sweltering afternoon. The city sounds like a dream image to Alec, though Magnus talks about the beggars on the temple steps and the sprawling slave markets as well as the shining domes plated with bronze and the flowers framing the doors of every home.

"If you told the people of Sumira about Vizima or Novigrad, they'd be just as wide-eyed as you are," Magnus says. "It's a matter of perspective."

"That doesn't make it sound any less amazing." Alec gets the soap dish and washcloth; he's starting to yawn in the heat.

"That's fair. Would you like a hand?"

There's a conundrum: Magnus glowing with sweat, talking in steam-softened tones, is one thing. Magnus putting his hands on him, soap-slick and meticulous, breaks open a whole another thing. Alec manages the nearness, but the prospect of touch is like a step into summer darkness, perilous and enchanting.

Magnus brushes the damp curls of Alec's hair from the nape of his neck. "Let me do this for you. No ulterior motives, on my dubious word of honour."

Alec nods. He doesn't know why he's so skittish. Magnus is safe. That was almost the first thing Alec learned about him: _ apprehension is not the same thing as hatred_. Magnus said that to him, then proved it with word and deed from there on out.

He mumbles an apology against Magnus's wrist. Magnus sighs against the top of Alec's head, but neither laughs nor comments. He pours warm water over Alec and scrubs his back with the soaped cloth, deep circles that work the final twinges of soreness from his muscles. Tremulous warmth takes its place. It's not exactly want, not the jumpy desire Alec is getting to know, but a calmer sense of comfort.

He supposes the feeling of somebody taking care of him is new, too.

As Magnus turns, Alec grasps his hand, blinking water from his eyes. He's sitting down, so he has to pull Magnus in, let him hold on to his shoulder.

"I like your ulterior motives, though," he says, and kisses Magnus.

Magnus goes carefully pliant under the contact. Humming approval as Alec nibbles at his bottom lip, he leans into each tug of teeth and change in the slant of the kiss. It turns wet and deep, but even with the first sparks of lust glinting between them, Alec could dwell there for hours, mapping out the feel of Magnus's mouth.

A small sound of discomfort from Magnus interrupts them. Alec walks his hand along the taut muscles of his shoulder. "Bad angle?"

"Mm-hm. May I?" Without missing a beat, Magnus taps Alec's chest. His knee slants over Alec's thigh.

Swallowing his bemusement, Alec nods, and Magnus slides into his lap, his right foot dangling over the back of the bench. As Alec tries to brace him, then twitches at his own presumption, Magnus steers his hand down onto his ass. His fingers sink into solid muscle and soft skin, the tips of them digging into the juncture of Magnus's thigh and buttock.

"You can touch me," Magnus says, low and silken. "I've spent weeks dreaming you would."

Alec did not need that image. It's bad enough to be haunted by his own restless nights on the road, but so much worse to think Magnus might've done the same, might've thought of _ Alec _ like this, in smouldering, yearning fragments now beggared by the truth that he has Magnus in his arms.

He brings Magnus's left hand to his mouth and kisses the backs of his fingers one by one. From there, down to the first knuckle where specks of alchemical powder have burned a pale smattering of stars in Magnus's skin. Slow, open-mouthed kisses across the knuckles, the clean salt taste of skin, the hitch of Magnus's other hand as it drags over Alec's neck and presses into his hair. Alec could tip Magnus onto the bench and chart every inch of him with his lips, be lost in the warm expanse of his body.

Magnus closes his hand in a fist. His exhalation is a shaky gust in Alec's ear. "Oh, that's—oh, you. Just let me—"

Alec has a hazy flash of Magnus's eyes, wide and overwhelmed, full of something that seeps to the root of his heart like water into parched earth. Alec wants to cup his hand and catch it there, safe in the hollow of his palm.

Magnus blinks, and the thing in his gaze fades.

When he pulls Alec up haphazardly and kisses him, it's with bruising purpose that only softens as the kiss goes. He forces his breaths back under control, and yet a stubborn tension trembles under his focus.

Startled, Alec bends to Magnus's whim, to this change of pace, and accepts the choppy rhythm of their kissing. Magnus snakes a hand between them, and Alec jolts with a spike of red-edged desire as Magnus palms his cock with evident practiced ease. At the first long twist, Alec bites down a moan. He barely noticed how hard he was, but now Magnus's teasing touch feels like it could undo him on any stroke.

Magnus leans back, his weight canted to his left leg, to give Alec's cock an appraising look, watching as his own fist slides over it.

"What?" Alec manages.

"If you could see yourself." Magnus kisses away any reply Alec could muster. "Someone should write songs about you."

Alec is pretty sure he just looks wild and sodden, gasping too loudly, his free hand clamped on the edge of the bench. "I—I did tell you what was gonna happen if I ended up in some minstrel's repertoire."

"You did. What was the word you used? _Skewering_? A tad brutal, perhaps, but I don't mind a spot of rough play, if that's what stokes your fires."

Magnus keeps glancing along Alec's body instead of his face, sweeping and seemingly aimless, a hunter searching for movement. Alec tries to form a coherent answer—_I don't know, I don't know, all I wanted was you_—and ends up with a half-acquiescent hum.

"You have such a lovely cock," Magnus mutters, "I have a fancy to sit on it right here, feel it thick in me. Would you like that, darling?"

Something in Alec cracks, a bright burst whose impact shudders through his body. He's not innocent: he's lived among crude fighting folk and listened to their crude stories. He knows the places tongues and fingers and pricks may go, though any man on the receiving end is mostly painted as the butt of a cruel joke. He dreamed of Magnus's giving mouth and their kiss in the woods, and woke up burning.

"Yes." If Magnus wants that, if that's what lights him up, then how could Alec refuse him? "Yeah, sure, I would, but I promised you somewhere we wouldn't be bothered, right? So maybe—"

"You're quite right." Magnus dips his chin, though laughter trickles into his voice. "Hold that thought. I'm not done with you."

"I sorta hope you're not." Alec works up an answering laugh. It might ease things. 

In a swift, facile movement that should make Alec worry for his leg, Magnus kneels on the floor. The flash in his eyes, still keen as a stalking cat's, is the only warning Alec gets. Magnus's mouth closes over his cock, and the first tight drag nearly draws him over the edge.

"Oh, shit," he says, unsteady. "What are you—oh—"

With a huff that might be satisfied in tone, Magnus sucks him in deep, wrapping him in wet sensation that rushes over every thought that isn't some variation of _ oh fuck _ or _ please. _The sweep of Magnus's tongue over the crown makes those words chatter up his throat, as Magnus marks slick circles down his shaft.

Alec fists a hand at Magnus's nape, trying not to just grasp and claim him, to hold his mouth there and rut into it without heed. That's probably not polite. The absurdity of the idea nearly makes him laugh again.

"Magnus, I can't—" Between the steam-dense air and Magnus's mouth on him, his fingers stroking where his lips and tongue don't reach, Alec's thoughts turn floaty and tattered. His toes curl and uncurl against the floor.

"You can grip my hair." Magnus gives Alec's cock a broad lick, and that's hardly fair when he then keeps talking. "Or fuck my mouth, if you'd like. No need to be shy."

A little dazed, Alec opens his palm, watches his own fingers slip into the black, wrung tangle of Magnus's hair. Magnus makes a wanting noise that shivers around Alec's cock as he takes him in again, still and wet, waiting. Waiting for Alec to press him down.

Alec's first gesture is too timid, a mere tug that barely goes anywhere. Magnus inhales through his nose, sharply, and Alec's throat pinches with hurt and something like annoyance.

_ No need to be shy. _Can he stop acting like a blushing youth after his first stolen kiss, then?

The next sound coming from Magnus is choked and guttural, like it's less under his control than his frothy banter. He works his tongue over Alec's cock in eager slides, even as Alec sets the rhythm with a hand he wills to firmness. Magnus's left hand curls under his balls; lust lashes through him like the snap of a bowstring. His hips roll in place, pushing him deeper into Magnus's mouth. The pleasure becomes a hot, undammed surge that builds and brims and spills over without warning.

Alec comes, twitching, biting his own knuckles out of some ingrained instinct to be quiet. Between his knees, Magnus gasps thickly. His body jerks against Alec and his temple presses against his heaving ribs for a moment.

Alec's chest churns at that, the sight of Magnus's bowed head, the slope of his neck, the curved tip of the scar on his back. It feels like an opening, a dent in his facade.

"I thought you had plans," Alec rasps through the warm, blurry cloud that is settling on him. It's like he's been unspooled and then coiled up neatly again. He's loose and free and without a clue. What's he supposed to do with his hands, with any part of himself? He touches Magnus's shoulder with hesitant fingers.

Magnus spits into his right hand. "I do. Have plans. You were so on edge you'd have come before I even had you inside me. Now that I've seen you, ah, at full mast, I don't intend to spoil this for myself."

He sounds merry and hoarse, unconcerned. He scoops up water to rinse his hand, and Alec understands that his palm is covered in both their spend.

"Right," Alec says, trying to shore up his voice. "I mean, m' not complaining." Heavy and useless, his hand drops into his lap.

"That's a relief." Magnus chuckles. "You sounded like it was a satisfactory first round."

Alec's hum must pass for a laugh, since Magnus takes it for an answer.

Magnus came into his own hand without Alec even being aware that he did, beyond the few liminal cues he gave. And this is the first time Alec ever came from anything but his own hand. The first time somebody touched him with desire, wanting to please him.

_ You didn't even let me touch you. _ That shouldn't ache, should it? Magnus asked him every time—_may I, would you like this_—and Alec permitted him, caught up in his words, and here they both are, sated and spent. Magnus's mouth looks dark and bruised with use even in the flickering candlelight.

The desire to kiss him still flares in Alec, but doubt mars it now.

Magnus clambers onto his feet, and the effort shows. "Shall we finish up?"

"Yeah." Alec hastens to stand himself, stalling the impulse to offer Magnus support. "Let's."

*

The clouds have shuttered the stars as they come outside, bundled in their cloaks for the walk up to the house. The naked branches of the yard trees creak in the wind. Alec is not surprised when the first clumped snowflakes land, one brushing his cheek, more flecking Magnus's shoulders. They're on the threshold of proper winter.

They washed up and set the sauna to rights. Alec handed Magnus every thing he asked for, helped him hang up the towels, scattered the coals in the stove. Maybe this is how it is between people who indulge a mutual whim. Maybe they talk casually afterwards, crack jokes, treat each other with common kindness, and no more.

As they curve around the roots of the oak at the house corner, Magnus sets his right foot wrong. At his sideways lurch, Alec seizes his hand to give him leverage, closing the distance before he can think. "You've got the cane."

The cane is tucked under Magnus's left arm. He draws his hand smoothly from Alec's grasp and leans on the cane instead. "I'm being a rotten patient, it seems. Your sister would do that fearsome thing with her eyebrows if she knew."

Usually the theatrical description of Izzy's scowl would get him a laugh from Alec. Now Alec's expression twists into a quick and probably damning resemblance of it. "She'd be right. Uh, maybe I should just walk you inside. It's warm in the house, and if your leg is acting up..."

"Ah. I've disappointed after all."

Alec tilts his head skyward, like some help might come from that quarter. "You didn't. It was... it was nice. I'm just not used to..." Words roll like gravel in his mouth, pebbles of truth he can't spit out.

"Ouch. You do know that in this context, _ nice _ means 'welcome to your main role in a drunken story about this terrible tryst I had'?" Magnus sounds like he's quirking a brow. "_Nice _is a patronising pat on the cheek in the morning, if you have to stay the night."

"I wasn't joking," Alec snaps. "I'm not slighting your performance, I'm worried about your damn leg."

"Straight after coming in my mouth like you hadn't had a good cocksucking in years." Magnus hums, an almost gentle sound. His hood has dropped back, and snow gathers in his hair. "I always knew you were sweet."

Alec knows so many of his own breaking points. He knows how far he can push himself, how long he can hold his breath, how many days he can live on water alone, how much physical pain he can endure. This fracture gives him no warning. One moment he's holding himself together, and the next his self-control shatters.

"Will you stop?" he bursts out. "You have a neat evasion lined up for everything, so just give me this one! Let me have that much, if I can't—"

Magnus stills. He has a way with that, a statuesque, deliberate quiet. "You want me to go. I was afraid of that."

_ Walk away_, whispers old instinct in Alec's ear. _ There's only hurt here. You've been dropped again, cut loose when you're no longer needed. _

That's how he's always survived. When it comes down to it, the last two months don't prove otherwise. He has to go. He has to leave before he is left.

"Well, you're afraid of _ something_!" He flings that at Magnus. "And I don't know anything, I don't know how to do this, I'm sorry if I ruined your clever plans."

"What are you talking about? When did I say—"

"_Stop_." Alec's wearing only his cloak and scarf over shirt and breeches, his boots barely buckled, not even a knife on him, and still the thing he most wants is to take Horse and let her carry him off into the snowfall. It's a brittle, icy thought.

_ People like us don't get happy endings. _Was that another thing he said to Magnus, or just a thing he knows to be true? At least, it seems, the old adage about witchers having no feelings is a lie. Oh, he wishes it weren't.

He doesn't remember turning away, but he finds himself storming down the slope towards the stable. His eyes are hot and prickly as he squints them in the dull gloom. The path crunches under his feet. Soon the fallen leaves will turn to muck and grit, to be buried by the incoming winter.

It was not like Magnus was ever going to stay. That's all he's talked about, being fit enough to ride, going to Novigrad, or back to the south of his stories, getting out of Alec's life. Shivers work their way through him, both from the chill and the throttling grief.

He broke his own code. He got involved, got too greedy, reached out for something that wasn't his to have.

Something thumps to the ground, breaking the noise of Alec's own strides. With half-running steps, Magnus reaches him. They're on the open ground between the house and the gate, the darkness streaked silver by the snow.

Magnus grasps Alec's right arm and pulls them both to an ungainly halt. "Alec. Alec."

As if he had no glib follow-up, he says it a third time. His left hand seeks Alec's back, alighting below his shoulder-blades.

Alec stands frozen as a hare under a falcon's shadow. Furious replies rise and fall, too rapid to make any sense. Magnus's fingers are hard on his arm but gentle on his back.

"What is it?" Magnus sounds muffled. Alec expects him to step around to face him, but he stays behind Alec's shoulder. "If—if you truly want to go, I won't stop you, but... Talk to me."

He knew enough pain could break him. He's been so broken, like every witcher that lives through the Trial. It seems kindness can do the same. Longing can splinter him just as surely as agony.

"What do you want from me?" Alec wrenches the question out of himself. It's a ridiculous one, anyway. Magnus draws breath, surely for a shrewd counter, something that'll nudge them away so nimbly you'd never know they skimmed the edge.

"I think it's more about what you want from me," he says instead. "You're right. I was afraid. It... unnerves me, the way you want me. Like there's nothing you're keeping back."

Alec lets out a caustic chuckle. The sarcasm doesn't last as he speaks. "That's all I've ever done. Kept my secrets."

"Not from me, though." It's neither a boast nor an accusation. Magnus says it with soft conviction. "Do you even know how much you've given me?"

"I thought it was a mutually beneficial arrangement, right?"

"Until it wasn't." Magnus's breath scrapes. He rests his head against the nape of Alec's neck, like he did that one night on the hillside. Alec flexes his fingers at his sides. "I may have honed an eye for your sort of secrets, but I shouldn't have assumed I understood you."

"You didn't answer my question." His own insistence almost startles Alec. He's gone to so much trouble to be overlooked, to be impermanent, to deal with people briskly and be gone.

Magnus's sigh seeps through Alec's hood as a rustle of heat. "I could tell you fancied me. But witcher or no, you had some reason to keep a lid on it, and that's something I've learned to respect." The light, blithe phrasing is undercut by his hushed tone. "So I thought, if we lived to see a quiet moment, I could indulge us both. Leave you something to remember me by. As a... thank you, I suppose. Oh, I knew I wasn't going to come out of this sounding good."

Snow melts along Alec's face and he couldn't care less. He listens, captive, his heart winding into new knots over each word.

He has to know. Even if it means he cracks every memory of his own brief happiness like a stick over the knee. "Did you want me? Or—or is this all because you feel like you owe me?"

"Gods of sky and stone," Magnus whispers. "Alec." He tugs at Alec's arm and Alec lets himself be turned around, to face Magnus and his cinched expression, taut and open at once. Alec's hold of his own countenance is unravelling, a quiver in his jaw that won't be stilled.

"Yes, you idiot." He doesn't resist as Magnus presses his thumbs on his cheeks, clasping his face. "You gallant, tender-hearted fool. How could I not want you? I wanted you from the moment you stepped into that common room and tried so hard not to turn every head. I wanted you when you matched me quip for quip, when you were clever and ruthlessly honourable, when you went out of your way so I didn't have to kill some hapless mercenaries who picked the wrong target."

"Magnus—" Alec seems capable of little besides staring. His hand finds Magnus's shoulder, the folds of his shirt that's too thin for the cold.

"Then that griffin nearly maimed me, and I was out of my head and likely too close to walking into the salt wind, and... you took my hand and said you'd be back for me." Magnus drops his head into Alec's shoulder, abrupt, like he did not plan to. "I should've run at that point. There was only the trifling hurdle of my game leg."

Alec knows every moment Magnus describes, remembers some of them with such clarity that he already feared being alone with them. He winds his arms around Magnus until they're flush to one another, Alec's cloak draping over them both. It doesn't feel fair—or possible—to keep distance between them.

"I'm sorry, but that makes me sort of glad for your game leg."

It takes him a second to interpret the sound Magnus makes as a laugh, a bark of unstrung nerves, mellowed by mirth. His left arm tucked around Alec's neck, Magnus kisses him on the temple. Then he trails over Alec's cheek, unhurried, the marks left by his lips cooling on the skin. Alec holds his breath, the only sound he can hear the drum of his own heart, as Magnus finally kisses his mouth with the same tender focus.

It's an intent, quiet kiss, and Alec feels it down to his toes, the care and near reverence of it.

"I haven't truly been close to anyone since Vizima," Magnus says. "I... may have forgotten how."

Alec bites his lip. "Well, you're my first. Guess that makes us both clueless."

"Please don't take this badly, but—no one, in all your years of wandering? A beautiful young thing like you. There are pleasure houses in Lyria where they'd fight each other to show you all the delights of the earth."

"If you say so." Alec's cheeks are already chilled, so maybe his blush won't make a difference. "And no. Does that bother you?"

"No," Magnus says, equally low. "If you'd still like to show me this quiet corner you mentioned."

"It's just the summer loft over the granary." Alec tries to stifle a smile. It creeps out anyway, scant and crooked. "There's a bed and a brazier, though. Better than bare ground and no fire."

"I must admit both my leg and I would welcome that." However self-effacing Magnus sounds, concern stirs in Alec. Magnus is leaned into him, and he seems steady on his feet, but he also has a witcher's tolerance for pain. He _ ran _to catch Alec, too.

Spurred by that thought, Alec cants Magnus's chin up with the backs of his fingers. The kiss is easy and pliable; when they part, Magnus lingers to kiss him again, soft on the corner of his mouth.

"Come on," Alec says. "It's not far."

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't have sex in a sauna, but if you do, remember to hydrate.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec draws a line; Magnus tells a story; and most things turn out all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one took me criminally long, so without further ado: here's the conclusion of this ridiculous romp! Enjoy!
> 
> *
> 
> **Content Note**: This chapter contains a non-graphic reference to torture.

The brazier has burned down to a crimson glow of embers in its iron hull. Velvety shadows stretch along the sloped ceiling and the rough-hewn beams that add to the close atmosphere. The bed, straw pallets on a wooden frame, sits on the left, its pillows and quilts topped by sheepskins. The air is still cool, tinged with smoke from the brazier.

At the bottom of the stairs, Magnus took Alec's hand, unprompted, and let Alec help him climb. The loft is twilit to their eyes, but Magnus flicks his fingers, and flames leap to the fat candles on the washstand. Alec drapes his cloak over a beam. He felt more grounded with Magnus's hand in his, or maybe just because supporting him focused his own restive attention.

"So tell me," he says, "is it the humblest place you've ever tumbled somebody?" He makes a game attempt at mimicking Magnus's accent. "'There was this one time I met this southern lordling, and his bed was made with silks and fiend pelts—'"

"'—At which point I fled out the window, because there's no way to skin a fiend so the pelts don't still stink to high heaven'." On the other hand, Magnus's imitation of Alec trying to sound like him is uncanny. "You know that, O scion of the Griffin."

"Aren't we a little past the school rivalry?"

"You don't think the antagonism added spice?" Mischief dances in Magnus's eyes. "I was right about your fancy for music and moonlight."

"You'd probably wanna fight me again if I tried to sing."

"There must be some better noises I can get out of you." Magnus's hand on Alec's shoulder heralds the kiss; instead of Alec's mouth, he lays it under Alec's jaw, then moves in a damp, searing line to the stripe of bare shoulder shown by his collar.

"Glad you approve." Winding an arm around Magnus's neck, Alec allows himself the untroubled pleasure of the touch. His palm finds the scar beneath the use-softened hemp of Magnus's shirt.

"Leaving aside the fact that I'd have you on moss in the woods or a handy back alley—" Magnus nods his brow to Alec's cheek "—I do approve. I feel positively wooed."

The words are light as blades of grass, and still they land with a weight.

His hand on Magnus's stomach, Alec nudges him towards the bed. Magnus sits down heavily, with a hiss of exertion. Alec's concerned look earns him a sheepish half-smile. "My leg might be a small impediment here."

"We've solved worse problems together." Alec kneels to unlace Magnus's boot, pulls it off with care. Magnus watches with narrowed eyes as he repeats the gesture. "Does it hurt?"

Magnus blinks, as if he'd gone elsewhere for a moment. "Oh. My leg. No, not badly. I might be feeling the stairs."

"Sorry." Alec puts the boots under the bed, which leaves him with nothing to occupy his hands. "I just... wanted to be alone with you."

Magnus's laugh is dark and warm, like a secret spilled without care. "I say again, I can barely believe you haven't had hopeful lovers lining up at your campfire wherever you go."

His palms creep up Alec's sides. His hands are weathered by swordwork, their movement slow and a little aimless. Alec's breath tatters. Magnus finds the scars on his side left by his first encounter with a wraith, four grooves in the skin where sensation never fully returned. From there, Magnus cards his fingers through his chest hair with another appreciative sound. A chuckle hitches Alec's ribs, too.

"What?" he says. 

"Nothing that matters," Magnus says against his lips; with a choked sound, Alec slides right into the kiss. Magnus licks into his mouth, and it's no longer a shock but a delicious shiver of feeling. Alec grabs at his hair, strokes down along Magnus's neck and over his upper back, the taut skin next to the scar.

Magnus tenses. Alec's shirt bunches in his fists.

"I'm sorry." He exhales, shaded with dismay. "This is never graceful."

It seems safest to pull his hands back, so Alec does. "What did I do wrong?"

New sides of Magnus are unfolding to him moment to moment, but this one is still different. If he didn't know better, he'd say Magnus looks ashamed.

"You didn't do anything." Magnus slots a hand under Alec's, so their palms rest together. "I don't like to have my back touched. There was an unpleasant incident, when I got that scar."

To himself Alec can admit he's wondered about the old wound. Though long since healed, it's prominent, a shallowly curved line parallel to Magnus's spine. It looks like it was made by a blade, but the angle is odd for a sword blow.

This feels like a threshold of trust.

Alec laces his fingers between Magnus's. He has little reference for what Magnus makes him want: lust is part of it, and they _ could _ use each other for a night's diversion and move on. It would be simple, but the thought gives him a sick, hollow feeling.

"We've both taken a few hard knocks," he says, "or maybe I've taken too few. You still thought I was worth the bother."

"Of course you are."

"If I am, you must be, too." Alec hopes his face doesn't show how hard his heart beats. 

He tugs at Magnus's sleeve, a question he can't phrase, but Magnus leans in so Alec can pull the shirt off over his head. Magnus strips him of his own, a shaky urgency in his gestures. He opens Alec's belt, then the laces of his breeches, and stops there.

"I want you on my skin," he says. "I want it more than I want to fuck you, and... I'm not easy, Alec. Or, I am, if what you're looking for is a few laughs and a good ploughing, and maybe a kiss to send you off." Arid humour threads itself into his last words.

"I know you're not." Alec shucks his boots and breeches and lets them scatter where they land. "I never wanted you easy."

"Oh, have mercy," Magnus whispers, and drags Alec down into a kiss.

With his free hand, he steers Alec to his own laces, to loosen them so Alec can work his trousers over his hips. Alec tries to be careful, to mind Magnus's leg, but the kiss is like flame to kindling. Magnus's clothes are strewn here and there as he pulls them both into the bed. The linens have a waft of herbs to them, something tart and flowery, but the only thing Alec can truly mind is Magnus.

Panting between kisses, Magnus tumbles into the pillows. Alec caresses his thigh, skirts the talon marks. He tilts his other knee so Alec can lean between them, so they fit together in a feverish slide of skin. Their mouths meet and Alec doesn't know which of them groans first at the hungry contact. Magnus's left ankle hooks behind Alec's leg. They keep kissing, wet, uncoordinated, as Alec runs a palm over Magnus's chest, as Magnus's fingers dig into his ass.

He smothers his gasp into Magnus's neck. Magnus teases his fingertip down along the cleft. Alec feels out the soft scratch of hair on Magnus's chest, the spidering scar that spreads above his heart. That scar has taunted Alec for weeks, so he lets his hand dwell. It's old, only a slight variation in the texture of the skin.

"A wyvern spat on me," Magnus says. "I had a silk shirt on, and that slowed the venom before it could eat through my skin. I'd have a more impressive memento otherwise."

"Do I even want to know how you wore silk to a wyvern hunt?" Sweat beads on Alec's brow, and Magnus kisses away a drop as it trails down his nose.

"Style before sense, and nothing before style. That was my philosophy as a younger man." Magnus pinches his lip between his teeth. "And silk fibre weakens wyvern venom. There's another Cat trade secret for you."

"Yeah?" Alec says. Magnus's cock is hot against his stomach. He rolls his hips, slow enough to be pointed, and Magnus lets up a startled moan. "Pretty sure my honour demands I repay you for that."

Below the scar, Magnus's nipple has tightened at the faint chill of the air. Alec licks it until it's so tender that Magnus whines at the nibble of his teeth. His right hand meanders up from Magnus's bent knee, to his thigh, to the soft skin between his legs.

By then Magnus's cock juts up eagerly. On an impulse, Alec flicks his tongue over the crown, then the shaft, as Magnus wrests his head back. The texture is tantalising, the heat and heft and the slickness from his own mouth, but it's Magnus's reaction—the jolt of his hips, the arch of his back—that enthralls him.

"Are you sure this is repayment, and not—not some manner of extortion?"

"You tell me." Alec draws his lips up the shaft. "Should I stop?"

"Never." Magnus makes himself drop flat to the bed, gasping.

Desire trembles white-edged in Alec: it's not so fervent this time, but instead a mellow, languid want, inviting him to wander and tease. He works Magnus's cock with his right hand, lazy glides and wide, curving licks, as Magnus twists underneath him.

Alec wants to find every spot that makes him feel this way. To drink in every sound and shudder, every aborted thrust as Magnus tries not to grind up into his fist. He strokes his fingers lower, lower, until Magnus's buttocks clench in response.

He musters his voice. "Did you—do you still want me to fuck you?"

Magnus doesn't, he has to remind himself, think it degrading. Magnus's touch plucks at some hidden string that makes him quiver in resonance; Magnus's mouth on him shrove the world into nothing but feeling. If he can give Magnus back even a fraction of that, he's going to try.

"Oh, gods." Magnus's chest heaves in a way that probably shouldn't be so enticing. "Shall I be expected to remember all the obscene details I throw at you?"

"You did kinda emphasise that one."

Catching Alec's hand in his, Magnus kisses the backs of his fingers. "Listen, my heart. Yes, I do. I do. Only it's been a while, and truth be told, an injury like this throws a few sticks in that cartwheel."

He means it kindly. Alec nods, to the side so Magnus won't see his face as it darkens with remorse.

Would Magnus have done that, let Alec fuck him on a whim and tried to conceal that he wasn't recovered enough? The first half of his admission fills Alec with breathtaking warmth, but the second hammers out a condemning beat.

"Later then?" Magnus rubs a thumb over Alec's palm. "If you're up for a rematch, as it were."

Like there's going to be a _ later_. Like they're going to wake up in the morning, cold and carefree, stock the brazier, and then crawl into bed and make love again. Like there might be time for them to do this over and over, to learn each other. Alec almost forgot.

His stillness must betray him.

Magnus shifts to his own right, breaking their entanglement. Wordlessly he nudges Alec over so they're face to face. Sweat streaks them both, but the lust has crumpled into brittle, jagged pieces. Candlelight flutters on Magnus's cheek, veiling his back in a swath of inky shadow. His hand brushes Alec's cheek, a question unasked.

The world gives so little quarter. Alec's love for his siblings—or their love for him—couldn't stop their separation. What you keep and cherish today may be torn from you tomorrow.

"I don't want you to go," he blurts out.

Magnus's mouth twists, strung and unreadable. Like always. Every step they take towards each other seems to quake the very ground beneath.

Still, Alec's words keep pouring like a bitter wellspring. "I don't want to leave Izzy, either. I want to help her get to Oxenfurt, take her out of here, _something_, but every time you talk about riding off, it hurts. I know that's selfish. I know I can't keep you here. I just—I don't want you to go."

A voiceless sigh slips from Magnus. "You must know it's not you. You've been—"

"Kind and patient and you appreciate it, I know." Alec kicks himself onto his back, a wrench of movement, somewhere to vent his building tension. "I don't get why you can't _ accept _it. You want to pay Izzy for putting you up, she'll take your coin. Nobody's trying to offer you charity. We can't."

"I've been on the run for six years." The sentence is like a stone dropped into still water. "Catarina is my only constant, and I don't visit her often, either. A witcher's life is on the road. It can be a mean, ugly existence at the best of times." Magnus blinks rapidly into the darkness.

"You're telling me."

"You live it better than anyone I've met. In comparison, the things I've done, the things that have been done to me—" Magnus falters. "I've seen people with their bodies splintered, their spirits crushed. I know I'm not broken. But a touch battered, yes. A few crucial rivets short of a hauberk."

"Oh," Alec says into the pregnant pause. Every seething thing in him has gone still. "You think you don't deserve this. To stay somewhere."

He understands because he's a mirror to that feeling. It's ordered his life for so long. He's done his best to need nobody, because people only ever need him for a moment, a task to complete, a battle to fight.

"I think _ you _don't deserve me. You deserve easy, Alec. Someone good and true."

That's a feint. A lure for the eye so you can dart behind your opponent for a decisive blow—or a quick getaway. Alec doesn't know when he became this apt at reading Magnus, who can't drop the subterfuge even when he's laying his heart bare.

He sits up. "That's a load of horseshit."

Magnus's face does something almost comical. "What?"

"I don't _ deserve _ you, huh?" Comprehension quickens him like danger. "I'm not some—some fairytale lover trapped in a tower, some knightly ideal you can put on a pedestal. You keep telling me how I'm too good for you to handle, because it lets you pretend you're not _ worthy _of me?"

"That isn't at all what I said."

"It's what you meant, though. You have secrets. I get that. I don't have the right to ask you. But I can't watch you go off to Novigrad like you don't care what happens to you at all. Don't make me."

_ If you can't have a care for yourself, at least let me do that. _ Sometimes you need to borrow love, it seems. Like that day when Izzy took Alec to see the graves behind the house and told him she had no answers, no salve for the wound carved across his life, and held him all the while. She had nothing to give him but herself, her grief and affection.

Magnus gives him a bruised look, but haggard humour laces his tone. "You're not doing much to knock yourself off that pedestal."

"You want a list of my misdeeds? All the times I've let fear get the better of me? If it's me, if you don't want this—" Alec gestures between them, stymied by the lack of a word that would encompass _ Magnus and him _in the way he means.

It's no longer about the sex. Something has changed again, been transmuted in the crucible of their impossible yearnings and left to seek its shape in their halting words.

"Neither of us really knows how to do this, do we?" Magnus's lashes, stuck together, cast a shadow under his eyes. His gaze is fixed downward.

"No," Alec says, "but you make me want to try." He falls back into the quilts heaped by their tumble. "Come here?"

Magnus crawls on top of him, half on his side, his cheek to the hollow of Alec's shoulder. Alec almost puts a hand on his back, then cups it over the back of his neck instead.

"We slept together before ever bedding each other," Magnus says, low. "I should've known it'd come to this."

"Is that a rule?"

"Sex may leave you distracted, but sleep leaves you utterly open. One takes more trust than the other." Magnus strokes his fingers through Alec's hair. "Last time I did this, people died. Because I trusted them. Because they trusted me."

"You mean your people from Vizima." With the way Magnus keeps skirting the topic, there must be something unresolved there. "You avenged them, right? If that matters."

"If only a blade to the heart of a deserving bastard would cut free all the other burdens, too. Blackwell is dead. I'm grateful to you for that. But coming across him made me remember."

Alec's fingers trace the nape of Magnus's neck, a small, calming circle. "Somebody you cared about in particular?"

For all of Magnus's extravagant tales, Alec doesn't have much insight into his history. He paints a lavish picture of daring deeds and breathless conquests, but the gilding is peeling away.

"Our relationships were complex in that little band of scoundrels. It was as close to a family as I'd ever had. And it ended on the racks of the city dungeons. As I nearly did."

The scar on Magnus's back is not a battle wound, but a much crueler cut. Alec stills his hand.

"I'll spare you the details." Magnus speaks against Alec's neck, as if he could tuck the words there for safekeeping. "The guard's torturers had their sport of me. I was much more resilient than most of the poor fools that fell in their clutches. I... held their fascination for long enough for Catarina and Raphael to find me."

Alec doesn't need the details. Witchers die notoriously hard. It's another boon of the Trial, but it's all too easy to imagine how that endurance can be perverted to drag out suffering rather than simply keep one alive.

"It was Blackwell, wasn't it? How long?"

"His orders, if not his hand. The city guard was his little dominion, where his rule was absolute. The information we stole from him fetched a princely sum, and the irony is that it got the three of us—the three that survived—to the north." Magnus pauses. "I don't know where Raphael is now. We split up for safety's sake. Catarina found a posting at the Oxenfurt Academy. They like Zerrikanians there, especially those versed in medicine."

Magnus is not fragile. He disdained the notion himself, and Alec won't insult him by contesting that. His story unfolds sentence by precise sentence, but the way he curls into Alec's side gives it a sore undertone. Like he's unwrapping a bandage, unsure if the cut is still raw.

"I'm a little sorry I talked you out of killing his men. Or maybe just that you killed _ him _so quickly."

"Don't be." A pinprick of light pierces Magnus's expression. "I'd rather be someone who can make that choice. You reminded me that there was another way out of our predicament."

"What gets me," Alec says, "is that you can say that and not see how it reflects back on you. You harp on about—about my virtues, such as they are, but you've been doing this a lot longer than me. Been looked down on by people who still need your help. You carry it like it weighs nothing. Like you still find good things in the world."

"I found you, didn't I?"

Alec should deflect that. They're spinning in precarious balance like a child's top on a marble floor. They're also lying together, not a stitch of clothing between them, only Magnus's weight draped over him. Alec slides soft fingertips over his neck to his cheek, and Magnus shifts forward, only to halt an inch from Alec's face. The kiss hangs uninitiated.

Then Magnus says, "Put your hand on my back. Like you touched my face just now. I want to know."

A deep breath flexes Alec's ribs. Magnus's hand—the same hand that grips his sword with consummate skill, that calls forth fire and stunning force from thin air—spreads over his heart, deliberately light.

Alec begins from the same spot he did before: the top of Magnus's spine, its slight jut and slope down into the hollow of his shoulder-blades. He knows how it feels to go up against Magnus in a sparring match or fit their tactics together in a fight. He's had a taste of Magnus in the throes of passion, has seen how he opens and teases and plays. Now Magnus is too close for him to even see clearly, and yet Alec's never been more aware of him. The grain of the scar is rougher than his skin, dimpled by fine creases where stitches of silk or catgut were once sewn.

He feels more than hears Magnus mumble, "Don't stop." Magnus's breaths come shallow, sharp in, slower out. His fingers drag over Alec's side and settle on his ribs.

"I've got you," Alec whispers, and doesn't stop. A long sweep past the scar to the root of Magnus's spine, and up again, each subtle ridge and groove a symbol in a cipher he's working to unlock. "You can let go. Just... be here with me."

Magnus's laugh is lost in Alec's skin. His breaths go silent, only evident in the measured rise and fall of his sides. While Alec's hand treads the same patient course, lingering over the horror and wonder of that long-healed hurt, Magnus lets his own touch roam. The tip of his finger counts Alec's ribs and slides over the soft span of his abdomen to the point of his hipbone. They chart one another in the dark, soothed and nearly somnolent.

It happens so gradually Alec doesn't realise at once. The desire is more like a dream than the real thing, heavy and syrupy as it trickles into his limbs. He shifts, bracing his foot into the pallet, seeking the fitful press of Magnus's hand. Magnus makes a sweet, ragged sound. There's nothing deliberate about it, nothing calculated, only the warm knot of their bodies nestled in the bed. He's getting hard, lamentably so, from nothing more than this unthinking closeness—and Magnus is still touching him, along the outside of his leg, then back up.

"Sorry." It comes out as a rueful fragment of a wider sentiment.

"For this?" Magnus's knuckles trace his suddenly taut hip.

"Yeah." Alec smothers his searing cheek into the cool linen of the pillow. "I didn't mean to, to—"

"Alec." Magnus rustles up onto his elbows. His gaze is glazed and half-lidded, but a smile twitches at his mouth, and Alec gasps at the ripple of relief. "If you must beg my pardon, then so should I. You've been stroking my back and muttering sweet nothings, and I'm hard as a bog hag's heart."

Laughter wells from Alec's parched throat. "Right. That—that makes this less awkward."

Despite the pleased glint in Magnus's gaze, his voice cracks. "I rather hoped so."

"Please," Alec says, like it's the only word he knows. "Please."

With a sound between a sigh and a sob, Magnus surges into him. It is the least graceful kiss in Alec's short history of kisses, wet and raw, guided only by the urge to be closer. Alec wraps an arm around Magnus and heaves him fully on top of himself, none too gently, but Magnus only kisses him harder, leaning into the cradle of his knees so his cock slips hot and silken against Alec's own.

Alec's moan diverts the kiss. His fingers dent Magnus's buttock, even as Magnus wedges his good knee on the bed, and with this messy leverage, they move against each other. The rolling strokes have Alec scrambling to kiss Magnus again, as if that heady contact could hold him whole. Magnus is the one solid thing in the flood, the quiet in the heart of this storm they raise together.

He's used to seeking his own release in a guilty rush, aware of every bitten-off breath it takes him to finish. When Magnus gasps, "Oh, your hand, please, here," and steers his grip around both of them, he knows the motion but the purpose is new and heart-clenchingly bold. It's his left hand—his right arm is around Magnus, and only the Crone's icy whisper in his ear could break his hold—but he makes the best of it.

They're both too frantic to go gently, one need spurring the other. Magnus plies him with breathless kisses, on his mouth, on his cheeks, along his bared throat. Sweat pools between their bodies and smooths the motion of Alec's hand, short, strong twists, as Magnus sets his teeth on his shoulder, writhing in his grip.

"Alec, Alec, I—ah—"

Alec will never know what he was going to say, but the clench of his hips and the needy groan he gives are enough. His fingers dig into Alec's arm as he tips over, without artifice, without effort, and spills himself over Alec's stomach. His climax abates like the last waves under a dying wind, coasting through him one after another. Alec braces himself against the light flowering under his eyelids. He could come from nothing but the sensation of Magnus coming undone on his skin.

"Alec," Magnus says again, with a kind of rough adoration that does _ not _help Alec's splintering composure. "Look at me."

Under the candles, Magnus is ink and copper, laughing eyes and sweat-glossed skin. His smile crooks with both whimsy and affection. Alec's heart pounds like surf upon rock just to look at him; every word he could speak is dashed to pieces by the all-consuming desire.

"I have you." Magnus kisses him, a flicker of pressure, there and gone. He holds Alec's eye as he draws his palm across Alec's abdomen and the warmth of his own spend there, and wraps his slick hand around Alec.

Alec jerks helplessly at the feeling, thrusting up into Magnus's fist, need simmering sharp and brilliant up his spine. He slips through himself, or so it feels, through every trap and noose and shackle he's rigged to keep himself in check, and rushes ahead, heedlessly free. He can't stifle his own noises anymore. When he tries to cover his mouth, to bite his tongue, Magnus takes his hand and lodges it against the bed, their fingers interlaced.

"That's it, brave heart," Magnus says, rusty. "No shame. Come now. Come for me."

He may not mean it as permission, but that's all it takes. Clutching at the sheets, Alec skates over the jagged crest of his own pleasure with a moan of Magnus's name. Tensed around Magnus's knowing strokes, he stares up, dim and heady, to meet Magnus's rapt, tender eye.

They sink into the bed and into each other, knocking their foreheads together, gasping and chuckling. Their urgency smooths and deepens into sighing contentment, and lassitude weighs Alec's limbs. Magnus bows his head under his chin, his free arm slung over his side. If Alec nudged him, he might stir obligingly, favour him with an airy laugh and a bit of bad repartee. Their hands are still clasped in the narrow gap between them.

He curls into Magnus, his nose in his hair, and tugs a quilt over them both.

*

He doesn't remember falling asleep.

He creeps awake from a bone-deep slumber, and the cold air snaps at him as soon as he pokes his head out from under the covers. The brazier burns with a low steady flame, but the heat has yet to spread; someone has fed it moments ago.

Bundled in a quilt, Magnus is perched at the foot of the bed. He's toying with something, a small object that catches the fire's glow with a metallic, liquid reflection.

"Hey," Alec says, unintentionally rough.

"Did I wake you?" Magnus glances at him, warm and a touch wistful.

"No. Maybe." The utter, clean exhaustion that followed their passion must have dropped him like a stone. "It can't be morning yet, can it?"

"The fourth hour or so." The object in Magnus's fretful fingers is his witcher medallion. He lets the chain spool into his palm. "Water?"

Alec accepts the dripping cup Magnus scoops from the lidded bucket under the washstand. Sex is thirsty work, it seems. Once Alec has drunk, Magnus takes the cup back and sips himself, from the spot where Alec's mouth left a mark. Even in this hushed aftermath, a spark of heat prickles his throat. Magnus has staked a nonchalant claim on his space, on his body, and Alec has not only let him but welcomed him.

The medallion sits on the corner of the washstand where Magnus set it, the wildcat with its fangs bared in challenge.

Alec slumps back onto his side to face Magnus, who's kneeling on the floor. "Couldn't sleep?"

"I slept a little. I didn't have the benefit of a whole day's ride to knock me out—only our delightful exertions earlier." Magnus's tone lightens; his expression stays turned inward. "I was thinking about the past. And then about you."

Stumped for words, Alec shifts back. Makes room for Magnus or his thoughts.

Magnus stretches his arm onto the bed to take Alec by the hand. "Don't leave her. Your sister."

That was not what he expected to hear. "I wasn't planning to."

"I'm not trying to accuse you. I'm... remembering how routinely I've left people behind. How easy it is to not go back. If the gods will it so, you have a long life ahead of you. You'll watch her grow old. Make time for her while she is in the world."

"I know. I will." Alec squeezes Magnus's offered hand, further bewildered. What else is he going to do?

"You don't know," Magnus says, unbearably gentle. "You haven't even outlived your first horse yet." It sounds like a joke, but it isn't.

"Come up from the floor," Alec says, instead of the dozen more disquieting things that rasp in the darkness. "It's the hour of the wolf. Too late for yesterday's worries, too early for tomorrow's, or so my master of arms used to say. Best spent asleep."

"And you're generously offering to share your warmth."

"Don't make me throw you over my shoulder."

"The problem with _ that_—" Magnus drops onto the bed "—is that you think it's a threat, but it reads as a promise." He burrows under the covers, inching onto the same pillow with Alec, as if there wasn't a heap of other perfectly good ones. He's shivering a little, and his chilly shins press between Alec's warmer ones.

"Here's another," Alec says. "Go to sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."

Magnus gives him a slow, drowsy look, and the edgy energy seems to drain out of him.

"The things you do for me, sweet stranger," he mumbles, and kisses Alec's shoulder. Another idle gesture that says, _ This, here, is mine now. _

Too tired and replete to fight him for the pillow, Alec slides his head down to Magnus's chest. He smells of sweat and Izzy's juniper soap, the wood ash from the brazier.

Alec lies quiet, listening until Magnus's breaths are lulled into the long rhythms of deepening sleep.

*

Silver needles of sunlight pierce the single-shuttered window above the stairs. Alec surfaces from a dream and nearly bruises his cheek on the cat's-head medallion laid on the pillow next to him.

Magnus is gone, along with his clothes. Alec's own are folded on top of the bedside chest. He closes the medallion loosely in his palm. The message is clear, the same Alec left for Magnus once before: _ I've gone, but not far. I'll be back. _

He smiles to himself, calmed, centred, before slipping the medallion in his belt pouch.

Half-muffled noises carry from the yard, so the day must be well under way. Alec stumbles through his ablutions. He's wrestling into his shirt when the door bangs open below and Izzy calls up the stairs, "Hey, sleepyhead! Get decent and get down here!"

"I'm coming, I'm coming." He abandons any hope of tucking his shirt in and throws his cloak on. "Who lit a fire under your ass?"

This is how Alec emerges, blinking owlishly and his hair uncombed, every sign pointing to exactly the kind of night he had, onto the snow-dappled yard. A stiff wind has scattered the clouds and left the air brisk and glassy. It'd be a perfect day for a wander in the woods.

He's not prepared for the slightly crumpled sheet of paper Izzy holds out to him. Her cheeks are bright with excitement. The cracked-off remains of cheap sealing wax decorate one edge.

"Jace wrote," she says. "He—he's not very verbose, but he wants to see you."

Alec takes the letter with sudden, throat-constricting care. It's a few lines in a fairly atrocious script—he supposes penmanship is not in high esteem in the soldiering profession—concluding with, _ tell him to write to me before he comes. I'll meet him at the ford_.

They're simple phrases. An offer to ride out halfway. An unspoken hope laid between the lines. His brother knows he lives, and has asked to see him. It is such a small thing. It changes the world.

"I'm gonna go as soon as the roads are passable," he says. His smile slips loose, mirrored by the good cheer Izzy fairly radiates. "Let the snows come in properly first."

"Think you might have company this time?" She tries to unruffle his horrible hair with a mittened hand, but devilment glitters in her eye. "At least you had a warm welcome home."

"Shut up," he grumbles. The effect is undermined by his inability to stop grinning.

Magnus and Clary troop up the rise to the front door of the house, her with brimming buckets from the well, him with a sack slung over his shoulder, though he balances on the cane.

"No, Biscuit," Magnus is saying, "I don't think the witcher's blade is quite the tool an enterprising young lady should add to her arsenal. But I have an Ofiri dagger that might suit your underhanded stabbing needs."

"I like the sound of that." Clary heaves the first bucket over the threshold as Magnus opens the door for her. "So you'll teach me?"

He flashes a rakish smile. Alec can see it glint all the way from the granary. "Is there something else to do in Velen all winter long?"

"It's something," Izzy says to Alec, low and deadpan, "for when he's not getting undignified noises out of you."

"_Iz_." He sounds more plaintive than he meant. This must be the other half of what he's missed: relentless sisterly commentary on every aspect of his life, even those he might prefer to keep under the lid.

A little under the lid, he amends his thought. Some details will stay in the loft, in the twilit spaces only he and Magnus know.

"Hush." Izzy puts her face against his arm. "I'm happy for you. And we're happy to have you, both of you, for as long as you want to stay."

Magnus is still on the steps, holding the door open. He raises a beckoning hand. "Are you two coming? There's about to be food, and after that, I'm told, I'm on storytelling duty."

Alec wraps his arm around his sister, and side by side, they go in.

_ end _

**Author's Note:**

> Here we are. I want to thank you all for your warm and generous words—I'm behind on comment replies, but I read every single one, I promise!—, for your patience as I juggled work and life and this fic-writing shtick, and for coming on this road trip of witchers and horses and all too adorable monsters.
> 
> A shout-out, first off, to Pear, who knew little about both _Shadowhunters_ and _The Witcher_ and still offered astute and much-needed feedback on my drafts, even as the chapter count kept climbing. Special thanks to Lynne, who kept me writing through thick and thin and offered a hand up when the last chapter tripped me; always to Jilly, for being a friend in need; to Mindy, for the many, many word wars; and to Joan, who is my boon companion and receives all my embarrassing zero drafts with grace. ilu ♥
> 
> If you want to yell at me on social media, I am on:
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen) and my fic hashtag is #junefic
> 
> Or drop a comment below <3


End file.
